


All Desire in a Day

by Lomonaaeren



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, M/M, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-04
Updated: 2012-06-04
Packaged: 2017-11-06 21:01:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 28,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/423147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lomonaaeren/pseuds/Lomonaaeren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Draco wants to know what would have happened if Harry had been Sorted into Slytherin. He wants to know more than might be quite good for him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Rites of Desire

**Author's Note:**

> This is an attempt to do a twist on the idea of a Sorting AU. The title is a twist on Ray Bradbury's story "All Summer in a Day."

“Harry, you _bastard!_ ”

Draco clutched his broom to bring the spinning under control and glared in the general direction of his boyfriend, whose laughter rang in his ears. Harry swooped up and turned around to show Draco that he’d caught the Snitch, flourishing his fist so Draco could see from every angle.

“You were just saying?” Harry asked, flying closer. His black hair hung in matted curls over his forehead, and Draco stifled an urge to lean forwards and bring their lips together. It would give Harry entirely the wrong idea. 

And Draco was irritated.

“About how you were destined to win the match?” Harry prompted him, hovering near him and gazing at him with such innocence that Draco felt another urge, this one to bite that smug mouth and see what Harry would do next.

“I would have caught it, too, if you hadn’t pulled on my broom,” Draco said darkly, checking his balance with care and keeping a cautious eye on Harry’s hands, although one was on his broom and one was busy with the Snitch. “Honestly, what possessed you to do that? _I’m_ the one who’s supposed to cheat.”

“Because that’s the only way you’d win otherwise?” Harry flew closer. Draco could see the way his eyelashes curled, and stared for a second. Then Harry laughed, and he shook his head furiously and came back to the conversation.

“No, you prat,” Draco snapped. “Because Slytherins cheat to win. Everyone knows that Gryffindors are honorable wankers who would die before they break a single rule. They’re always fair, even if it’s _sneaky_ fair.” He tapped the back of his broom, and looked back at the bristles Harry’s tug had dislodged from the tail. “There’s no way you could claim that falls inside the rules, no matter what you said.”

“Maybe not,” Harry said, giving Draco a deep, enigmatic look that caused Draco to roll his eyes. Harry was simply no good at those, whatever he thought. “But we’re not in Hogwarts anymore. We can’t be defined by just our Houses. I’ve told you that before.” He paused, then added, as Draco was about to argue that the Sorting Hat saw inside all their heads and even had a better idea of what they would become than they did themselves, “Besides, if we _could_ be defined that way, I think I might surprise you.”

Draco snorted. “Is this about the streak of Hufflepuff that I always suspected you had? Don’t worry, I’ll forgive you if it is.”

Harry rolled his eyes. “Bastard,” he said in turn, but without much heat behind his voice. “No. The Sorting Hat wanted to put me in Slytherin. The only reason it didn’t was because I begged it to put me somewhere else, and Gryffindor was the best second choice.” He shrugged with one shoulder, then darted down, past Draco, towards their back-garden pitch.

Draco stared at nothing, then spluttered and flew after Harry. “What the fuck do you mean?” he demanded, as he landed beside him and watched Harry pull off his gloves. “Is this some kind of joke?”

“Why?” Harry looked at him, but there was a darkness in the back of his eyes, the way there often was when they spoke about Hogwarts and the war. “That proud of your ability to spot a Slytherin at a hundred paces?”

“That has nothing to do with it,” Draco said, folding his arms, though he had to admit he was miffed that he had never thought Harry might have Slytherin qualities. Then again, perhaps that was the reason they got along as well as they did. “I just want to know why this happened, and if you’re kidding, and why you never told me if it’s true, and why you _refused._ ”

“I refused because you were a prat,” Harry said, shaking off the Quidditch leathers before he folded them. Draco’s mouth dried out when he saw the thin shirt and trousers that were all Harry wore under the leather in summer weather, but he told himself sternly to pay attention. “And that hasn’t changed.”

“Because you met me on the train?” Draco said. “That was enough to convince you?”

His voice was soft, and Harry seemed to hear it and the reason for it, because he paused and smiled temperately at Draco. “Yeah,” he said, with his voice softer as well. “It was. But I didn’t know much about the Houses or anything then. You know why.”

The tale of Harry’s childhood with the Dursleys had been gone over enough times between them. Draco acknowledged it with a nod. “But you never told me about this,” he said.

“Because I thought it would hurt your feelings, knowing why I didn’t choose Slytherin,” Harry said. He leaned forwards and kissed Draco’s cheek, then clapped him on the shoulder. “I know that you were young and stupid. So was I. You didn’t need to be reminded of it. And because I knew you would put a lot more importance on it than it deserves,” he added, his voice edged with disapproval. “I can see you doing that already.”

Draco lifted his chin. “I’m not putting any importance on it. You’re right, we were young and stupid. You would have been in Slytherin with me if you were smart.”

Harry rolled his eyes, but seemed relieved to let the subject drop, and he talked mostly about how George Weasley was handling the joke shop these days as they went in to eat. Draco had made the lunch earlier, a salad that could be kept under Preservation and Cooling Charms until their match finished. Harry got dressing on the walls when he waved his fork around in excitement, as he tended to do, but otherwise it passed peacefully. Draco got to watch the changing emotions on Harry’s face and be contented, as he so often did. It hadn’t been long ago that he had assumed he couldn’t, wouldn’t, have this.

But this time, at least for Draco, there was another, unspoken presence at the table: the shadow of the Slytherin Harry could have been, and the friend he would have been to Draco, and the lover he would have been far sooner than was the case in reality.

Maybe Harry had put it behind him; maybe it didn’t occur to him that anyone would think it was important, since he had lived with the knowledge for so long. He didn’t mention it again from lunch to the time that he kissed Draco and fell asleep in the bed, curled up with a perfect place for Draco to rest his head in the crook of his arm.

Instead of taking up the invitation, Draco turned away and went to his lab, in the cellar under the house, which Harry knew about and didn’t know about at the same time.

*

Oh, Harry knew the dimensions of the cellar, how wide it was, how it got dirt and iron polish smeared all in during the summer when Draco used it as a storage space for Potions ingredients and was in and out all day. He knew there were steps down to it, and he knew Draco had asked him for the loan of the cellar when he first moved in, and that he had granted it without hesitation. The space didn’t matter to him, and that was one reason Draco had been certain he would get it.

He _hadn’t_ been certain, during those days, that he mattered enough to Harry to ask to take over anything important.

Harry didn’t know about the ritual circle set into the floor, or the experimental potions that came out of the cellar each month in small and neatly-packed boxes, or the owls that flew in through the windows in the dead of night and left their cryptic, coded orders in rows on the table for Draco to discover the next morning. He didn’t know about the rites that Draco sometimes performed here, when he had had the time to build up a good supply of fresh blood in his own veins, or catch a small animal that he could prepare and drain in the right way. 

Draco had never stopped being a Dark wizard, though he had stopped being so many other things: a Slytherin, a Death Eater, someone who was too afraid of his parents to go after what he really wanted. He wondered if Harry would hate him for it, but he had never proposed the question and Harry had never asked. They were content to leave some answers in the shadows.

Like the fact that Harry should have been in Slytherin. With him.

Draco’s hands shook as he lit the candles at the compass points of the circle, so much so that he fumbled the charm to light the northernmost candle and nearly sent the flame roaring up towards the ceiling. He made himself sit down and bury his head in his arms, exhaling and inhaling as he chanted the list of ingredients of the Draught of Living Death in his head.

He knew better than this. He knew better than to take the potion he wanted to take, or enter the circle, when he was in such an unsettled emotional state.

But _why_ did it matter to him that he hadn’t known about Harry almost being Sorted into Slytherin until this evening? Harry hadn’t kept the secret from him out of evil motives, but because he didn’t want to hurt Draco and—Draco sensed this much—it genuinely wasn’t important to him. It was a small thing that had happened a long time ago.

Draco closed his eyes, and this time chanted the ingredients list for the Draught of Peace until the words buzzed in his ears.

It mattered because everything could have been _different._ He could have had Harry with him, as a friend, long before. The knotted, tangled friendship that Harry had with Weasley, something so thick that Draco still didn’t understand it and so resilient that it had survived Harry starting to date Draco instead of the ginger menace’s little sister, would have been cut off at the root. Perhaps Harry would have tried to reach out to Weasley, but Weasley’s prejudices at that age would have taken over.

Draco could have had Harry for himself, for years longer than he had had him.

He opened his eyes at last, and rose. The desire in him burned with a clear, steady flame now, outshining the candles. This was what he had needed, the shaking out of his jumbled thoughts. The most important things to complete this ritual and use this potion were desire and will, but one needed to understand the desire. Why it mattered. Why one was going to pour that will into being, and make it reality, and, from the reality, make it magic.

He finished lighting the candles, and spent a moment checking the state of the potion in its case of separate vials. Then he paused, and lightly shook his head. The potion was an inert base, not truly a mixture. It would activate only when Draco broke the seal on the first vial and spoke his wish. 

He had put this off long enough.

He gathered the vials in one hand and swept towards the circle, which gleamed dully, copper threaded with silver, in the candlelight. He closed his eyes and spent a moment clearing and ordering his mind, this time with the memories of Professor Snape’s speech on the first day of Potions class, before he crossed the circle of light and shadow the candles cast on the floor.

As he moved across it, he whispered an incantation, an old one, a half-song, like the incantation that he still sometimes remembered Professor Snape using over him as he lay on the floor suffering from Harry’s _Sectumsempra._ The song made the circle of shadow and light snap into being around him, suddenly solid, a barrier that would hold off influences from outside the ring until the rite was done.

Draco’s throat felt dry when he stopped singing. He licked his lips and wished for a moment that he had taken a drink before he came into the circle.

But he couldn’t take a step outside either circle until the ritual was done. Might as well get comfortable. He sank down inside the silver and copper and closed his eyes, tilting his head back.

“Darkness to bring dreams into being,” he said. “Shadows to keep them ambiguous. Candles to light the way.” He reached out to the first vial and let his hand rest on the red wax seal that closed the mouth, breathing lightly as he thought about what he wanted.

He sat there for long enough that his arm seemed to grow heavy and numb with desire, and his mind echoed and reechoed with the words Harry had spoken.

“I want to see what the world would have been like if Harry had been Sorted into Slytherin,” he whispered, and broke the seal.

The vial shuddered in his hand. The mixture inside stirred, and Draco heard a voice like whispering sand-grains, speaking from a distance, but moving closer and closer to him as he let it come. They would speak the future, the alternate past. They would speak the vision.

He spat into that vial, and set it aside. Then he broke the seal on the second one, already alive with whispers, because opening the first one had set this chain to uncoiling. Into this one, he shed a drop of blood he obtained by pricking his thumb, and like the first, he set it aside. Into the third, he squeezed a tear.

The other sealed vials, he mixed with the contents of a second set of patient, waiting glass tubes, sealed with Preservation Charms rather than wax. Urine and semen and sweat and mucus, once collected, retained their potency under magical containment better than the first three body fluids he had used. Draco mixed them with the dust vials one by one, and, finally, arranged the vials in a fan pattern around him, blood closest to his body, semen furthest away.

All around him, the rustling was a speaking windstorm. Chattering letters and enchanted mirrors had nothing on it.

Draco braced his hands in front of him and bent down to tear off a fragment of skin and nail with his teeth. He laid it in front of him, and the whispering stopped.

“I seek the truth,” he said. “I seek the past as it would have been, with the altering of one decision.” The words were flowing from his lips easily now, although they weren’t a set part of the ritual, unlike the initial incantation or the ordering of the vials. They couldn’t be known until he spoke his wish, which would be different each time. But now he knew, and he spoke back to them, these instruments of his delight, spoke with his body and the flesh he had sacrificed. “I seek the man I join myself with and the boy he would have been.”

There was a sense of tremendous pressure gripping his temples now, the kind of sensation Draco had sometimes felt in the air before a rising storm. He bit his tongue and continued to speak, dropping his words like honey into the sea.

“I seek to see him as he would have been, if he had chosen Slytherin. If he had not opposed the wisdom of a Hat who could see his soul, a Hat who belonged to one of the Founders himself. Give me the picture of a Hogwarts as it would have been, the war and the world and the wills of all involved.” His teeth were pressing down on his tongue, and he could taste the blood in his spit. He didn’t know if he should be doing that, given that he had enough blood in the vial nearest him already, but he knew it was happening. “Give it to me.”

The pressure clamped him like an iron coronet. The air held its breath.

“I will pay any price.”

Gold and green light sprang up in front of him, rising from the flames of the candles, a silent lightning strike without thunder, and the pressure broke and spilled down Draco’s face like water, like the blood from his chin. Like tears. Like light, and the rising tide of it that crept towards him—

Which ate the flesh on the floor and turned silver and green in the last moments before Draco began to lose consciousness, and wrapped around him like the curtains around his bed in the Slytherin boys’ rooms.

Which turned to darkness.

And the sensation of stillness yielding to motion, and time yielding to vision.


	2. Wanting and Wishing

“Better be _Slytherin!_ ”

Draco shook the words out of his ears and glanced around, orienting himself. He sat—or a younger version of himself sat; he reeled as he recognized the smallness of his hands, the absurd length of his arms—at the Slytherin table, leaning forwards, and staring at Harry Potter, who had just slipped the Sorting Hat off his head and looked at it with an expression of betrayal.

 _This is a different past,_ Draco quickly whispered to himself, securing the words within his head. It would be terribly easy to forget he had come to watch and simply slip into this persona of himself; he could already feel this younger Draco’s rising pride and triumph, and his mouth opened in a whoop of joy he hadn’t intended to make. Watching Harry walk towards the table, his hands out as if to balance himself on invisible rails, Draco-as he-was winced. _You are watching this through the eyes of a different self. Don’t forget. I think you would suffer if you forgot._

Harry ignored the Slytherins standing up and cheering for him. He turned his head instead, and Draco followed his gaze to see that he was looking at Weasley. Weasley glared, then folded his arms and turned his back.

 _I knew it,_ Draco thought, and his own smugness glided along a different track beneath his younger self’s jealousy. _I knew Weasley would give him up if he was Sorted into a different House. I wish my Harry could see this. He would know how shallow Weasley’s friendship really is then._

“Sit here, Potter!” Draco called out, and patted the bench next to him. “Harry.” He smiled, and waited for Harry to smile back. He’d always been nicer than Draco used to give him credit for when he hated him.

But this Harry darted a scorching glare at him, and then sat down in a different place and watched the rest of the Sorting, his back stiff. Draco frowned at his back. Then he snorted and rolled his eyes at himself, mentally, since his younger self’s did nothing but blink resentfully.

_Oh. Right. I’m being ridiculous. It’s still not long enough after the train for him to forget about Weasley and what I said then. Well, he will after we’ve been in the same House for a while._

And so, while the Draco of this past ate his food especially neatly and laughed especially loudly with his friends to show That Potter Boy what he was missing out on, Draco leaned back in the confines of a mind that felt like his own, only shrunken a few sizes, and waited. He would see Harry change soon enough.

*

Except he didn’t.

It was a few weeks later, or so Draco judged from the images that had glided past in front of his eyes, fast and smooth and indistinguishable. The spell would do that, he knew, hiding ordinary moments from him because they didn’t fulfill the wish he had asked for in the ritual, and showing him the important encounters, meetings, fights. 

Harry had settled into Slytherin House, or so it seemed. He spoke to Blaise and Theodore and Millicent with bare civility, and tolerated Pansy. He and the young Draco never seemed to speak without fighting, but even that, Draco thought, was an improvement over the first night. And he could feel how calm and quiet his younger self would grow when looking up and seeing Harry close at hand.

They had left Potions class and were walking up the corridor when Harry suddenly shouted, “Ron, wait!”

Draco felt the body he rode in glance up, and felt the jaw drop. Yes, there was Harry, his body almost flat to the floor as he ran towards Weasley, who for some reason had turned around at the end of the Gryffindor line and curled his lip with a dreadful disdain.

 _Look at him as he really is, Potter,_ Draco would have liked to shout back. _He hates you for your House. He’s the embodiment of everything that he argues Slytherin is: arrogant and prejudiced and blind._

But Weasley stood waiting, and said nothing until Harry caught up with him. Then he lowered his voice—as if that could hide their conversation from the ears of countless curious Slytherins—and hissed, “How can I trust you, Potter, when you’re with _them_?”

“I didn’t _want_ to be,” Harry said, and although he couldn’t see them because Harry had his back turned, Draco knew his green eyes would be flashing with furious passion. “The Sorting Hat told me I could do well in Slytherin, I begged it to put me in Gryffindor, and it put me here anyway! The whole thing’s the stupid Hat’s fault. But no one in Slytherin treats me the right way, they’re not nice to me—they want something, or they sneer about my mum and think I can’t hear–”

Draco’s younger self practically reeled back. For once, the action of his adopted body matched Draco’s mood. He had heard the whispers, sure, but he hadn’t put any special importance on them. Slytherin House had _always_ talked about Mudbloods and speculated like that about anyone who appeared to be half-blood.

And he hadn’t thought Harry would notice. He’d seemed oblivious of everything except Weasley and Granger and getting in trouble their first year—the real first year, the one Draco and Harry had _lived_. All Draco’s efforts to make Harry see his manners and his wealth and his superior knowledge had no effect.

“Yeah, that’s the way Slytherins are,” Weasley said, but he was giving Harry a strange look. “You swear that you didn’t want to be in there?”

Harry shook his head hard enough to make Draco hear a little snap in his neck. “No. Why would I? I want to have _friends_.” His voice broke a little on that last word, and Draco heard his younger self’s laughter a second later.

 _No, you idiot,_ he wanted to scream. _Haven’t you seen his baggy clothes yet, and the way he glares at everyone and waits for the moment they turn on him? He needs friends because he’s never_ had _any!_

But his younger self didn’t listen. Draco had learned already that he couldn’t control what that body said and did. He was here as a passenger only, a witness—

A witness, in this case, to the moment when this Draco destroyed his own chances of ever having Harry’s friendship.

“You think Slytherins care about that sort of thing, Potter?” Draco called out, and took an artistic moment to flip the strap of his satchel from one shoulder to the other. “We’re stronger than that! Maybe you’re right, and the Hat Sorted you wrongly after all.”

 _That’s not the way it works,_ Draco moaned to himself as he watched Harry’s face harden and his jaw set in the stubborn expression he knew all too well, when he tried to order _his_ Harry to attend Christmas dinner at the Manor instead of the Burrow. _The Hat doesn’t make mistakes, it’s not supposed to—_

“The Hat said I _could_ do well in Slytherin,” Harry said, and his legs were stiff and he looked like he was a bulldog, chewing on the words. “Not that I _would_. And with overstuffed, idiotic wankers like you for Housemates, I won’t!”

Draco would have bowed his head and closed his eyes if he had any physicality of his own. As it was, he could feel his younger self’s racing thoughts, his shock and his astonishment driving into his brain like spears. Until Harry had rejected his hand on the train, no one had ever spoken to him with defiance—his parents had other ways of working around him—and this was far beyond that.

And, because Draco was Draco and he knew that he’d had, at that age, only one thought when someone hurt him, he tried to get revenge.

“Idiotic, am I?” he said, and he wasn’t looking the way Draco was at Harry’s eyes, he didn’t know his expressions, he couldn’t see his hand balling into a fist down at his side. “Well, I know more than you do. More table manners, more Potions ingredients, more about living in a family with _parents_ —”

“What is going on here?”

And Professor Snape swooped around the corner, his eyes going so rapidly from one group of participants in this little drama to the next that Draco was sure he saw everything, everything that mattered. Draco slumped down against what felt like the back of the other Draco’s skull. Surely, surely this would mean the end of the confrontation, and he would manage to soothe things back into alignment, would show Harry that Slytherin was where he was meant to be.

Then he saw the way Snape’s eyes locked on Harry. He had been too busy shaking his head over the way his Housemates interacted with Harry to remember how Snape used to hate the other boy, but there it was, the shine not dulled by Harry’s placement in his House. If anything, Draco thought suddenly, it was worse, because now Snape couldn’t pretend that all Harry’s characteristics matched the stereotype he hated; he would be forced to admit they had some things in common.

Malfoy—Draco had decided that he might as well call the other Draco by that name that Harry even now sneered—piped up, and Draco could picture the expression on his face without a mirror, earnest and steadfast. “Oh, Professor Snape, good, you’re here! Potter was just threatening me and saying that he’s not proud to be a Slytherin!”

 _Don’t fall for it,_ Draco cried out silently. _You know the games he plays, the games his father taught him to play, and you have to see that Harry really_ is _a Slytherin. I know you have a fine brain, sir, look past those machinations and see…_

But Snape wasn’t going to see. He gave a smile that would have done a werewolf proud and said, “So, Mr. Potter thinks that he should belong in the House of the Brave and Noble instead of the Cunning and Ambitious, does he? Tell me, Potter, where _you_ think you belong, keeping in mind that you must have had, though I am staggered to admit it, the cleverness to fool the Sorting Hat.”

Harry looked up at him, and Draco saw the way his hands clenched. Snape would see that and think of it as aggressiveness, the trait he probably associated the most with James Potter and the others who had bullied him; Harry had confessed, in quiet tones, what he had seen in the Professor’s memories and Pensieve, and Draco had drawn the correct conclusions from what he hadn’t heard. He stared at Harry, and saw nothing he should, and he wouldn’t understand Harry’s reactions, which came from abusive relatives. As far as Draco knew, Harry’s uncle had never hit him, but that hardly mattered. He had shouted, and he had ridiculed Harry’s intelligence and magic and everything else about him, and it wouldn’t be hard for Harry to put Snape in the same category.

“Well, Potter?” Snape shifted a step closer. “We’re all waiting.”

“I think I belong where I choose,” Harry said, in such level tones that Draco wouldn’t have believed he was hearing them from a boy that young, except that he knew Harry. “I wanted to be in Gryffindor. The Hat put me in Slytherin instead. But everyone whispering around me tells me that I’m no good and my mum is no good and I’m a blood traitor. They don’t _want_ me to belong with them.” His eyes cut towards Malfoy for a moment. “Why should I stay here? I want to go to Gryffindor. I want to be re-Sorted.”

Draco would, this time, have been trembling if he had a body. They had handled it as badly as it could be handled, Malfoy and Snape and the rest of them. They had driven Harry into making a stand, instead of coaxing him around, and when Harry had told them himself that he trusted people who were nice to him, not sarcastic. They were going to lose him.

Snape didn’t seem to have that fear, or perhaps for him it was more in the nature of a gift, not a fear. From the side, Draco saw Snape’s nostrils flare, and he looked down at the floor for a moment. Choosing his course of action? Considering the lay of the land carefully? Draco hoped so.

No. Hiding a smile.

“Re-Sortings, wherever you may have heard of them, are not performed, Mr. Potter,” Snape said at last. “The Hat’s decision is final. As for the Slytherin qualities it may have seen in you, we can only hope that they manifest themselves soon.” And he turned away from Harry, spinning on his heel, to look at Malfoy and his friends. “Are you hurt?”

 _It never escalated to wands,_ Draco thought. _You must see that, Severus!_ Behind the man’s oblivious back, he saw Weasley holding out his hand to Harry, his face solemn. Were his lips shaping the words “I was wrong about you”? They may have been. Draco would have given another scrap of his own flesh and blood for someone in Slytherin to say that to Harry.

“Only a little hurt, Professor Snape,” Malfoy whimpered, and the other Slytherins around him began to nod and whine and claim minor injuries. None of them saw what Draco saw, the searing glance of contempt Harry directed at them, or the way he walked on in the company of the Gryffindors. No one cared. Draco could feel the satisfaction brooding at the front of Malfoy’s brain like a bird on a nest. Later, he might want the friendship of the Boy-Who-Lived again, but for now, all he cared about was that he had won the confrontation, and convinced the professor to believe him.

_I was so blind. How did I see anything at that age?_

*

Most of the rest of the year passed in bright, still images. Harry laughing with the Gryffindors, and sitting at the Gryffindor table as often as he could get away with. Harry playing Quidditch, showing he was good at it, but refusing to try out for the Slytherin team. In fact, Snape expressly forbade him to try out, and Harry scowled as long as Snape faced him. The minute Snape turned around, Harry’s frown dropped away, and he showed a secret smile.

 _Well, we taught him one thing at least,_ Draco thought in despair. _We taught him how to lie._

Harry came into the common room with badly-hidden wounds more than once, but by that time, Malfoy had decided to ignore him as not worthy of a pure-blood’s friendship, and most of the other Slytherins followed suit. Blaise was the only one who talked to him, and Harry would just smile and say that he had been to see Madam Pomfrey.

Quirrell, Draco was sure. And maybe Snape was fighting Quirrell, somewhere far away from the common room and the oblivious Malfoy’s notice. But he sure as hell didn’t care about making Harry part of his House on a daily basis.

And then came the end of the year, with the Great Hall hung with Slytherin banners and filled with loud celebration. Draco ignored the battering of Malfoy’s immature emotions and blinked at Harry sitting at his own table, watching the Gryffindor one. He and Weasley and Granger had already exchanged more than one smile, but Draco didn’t know what it meant. Surely Gryffindor couldn’t win the House Cup this year, could they? Because the points Dumbledore gave to Harry for saving the Stone would be Slytherin points.

And sure enough, Dumbledore stood up and made his speech. But when he reached Harry, or at least the point in the speech where Draco remembered Harry being honored, Harry gave a modest little cough and raised his hand. The Headmaster paused and inclined his head as though to an equal.

Malfoy sneered. Draco again wished for hands to grip his throat and throttle him. Those signs were ones that he _should_ have noticed; he _should_ have realized it would be worthwhile to cultivate the friendship of someone the Headmaster had marked as a peer. But no, Malfoy just sat there and waited for the right moment to bang his cup again.

“My contribution was just what I _had_ to do,” Harry said. “What I was forced against my will to do, even. I didn’t display half the bravery and friendship that other people did.” Again he smiled at Weasley and Granger. “So I ask that you don’t reward me with the points, Headmaster. Give them to the people who deserve them.”

Snape sat in his seat, frozen with rage. Draco would have liked to close his eyes—and no, Malfoy’s rapid blinking _didn’t_ count. Well, this was the result of Snape driving Harry away and basically declaring that he didn’t care if the boy wanted to think of himself as a Gryffindor.

Dumbledore stayed still, his eyes bright and quiet as they searched Harry’s face. “You’re sure, Mr. Potter?” he asked.

Harry nodded firmly. “I am.”

And Dumbledore turned with a smile and gave the points to Gryffindor, and the banners changed to red and gold, and Malfoy muttered furiously to himself and made threats against Harry, not under his breath. Harry sat there, serenely not caring. Of course he didn’t, Draco knew; he slept with charms and wards around his bed, thanks to an incident earlier in the year when his wounds had come from some of the older Slytherin students attacking the “dirty half-blood.”

Well, at least one thing hadn’t changed when Harry was placed in Slytherin. He was still as stubborn as hell.

The mists of the vision closed in around Draco.


	3. Memory and Desire

Draco opened his eyes to brightness, so much so that he squinted from side to side at first, wondering if he was in St. Mungo’s. Perhaps Harry had found him in the middle of his circle once the ritual ended, hadn’t recognized the implements around him, and had rushed him to the Healers. At this point, Draco thought he could welcome a visit there, if only to obtain a headache draught he wouldn’t have to brew himself. Malfoy’s behavior had been idiotic enough to make his temples pound.

But no, he was hovering in the bright sunlight—or Malfoy was, on a broom high above the Pitch, while the rest of the Slytherin team encircled him. Flashing opposite from him on the brooms were the scarlet robes of the Gryffindors.

_Harry never became Seeker in this reality._

There was a shout and a roar that seemed to come from all the throats around him at once, his own included, and then the Snitch flitted towards him. The Gryffindor Seeker, a huge, clumsy oaf Draco didn’t recognize, blundered towards Malfoy, his hand stretched out, and Malfoy avoided him easily. Draco felt his contempt and his excitement as thorn-edges in his mind, nearly the same emotion.

_Perhaps I can win for once!_

He couldn’t have said who thought that, him or Malfoy. At the moment, they were close to the same being. And then Malfoy dived and rose, and pulled off a complicated twisting maneuver that Draco knew would look much less impressive than it really was to those below, and the Snitch hit his palm with the most satisfying noise he’d ever heard. 

This time, the roar was loud enough to almost knock him off his broom.

Malfoy came lightly to earth and looked about. Draco, perforce, followed his gaze, and saw his yearmates sitting in the second row of the stands. Malfoy arched his neck and made a preening gesture so unconscious it startled Draco; he must have done the same thing a hundred times and never realized how _obnoxious_ it would look.

Malfoy looked at Harry. Harry looked at his friends, Weasley and Granger, who Draco knew in an instant from Malfoy’s memories had accompanied Harry that morning because they wanted to sit with him and not because they wanted to watch the game, and talked to them, and gave no sign that he’d noticed Malfoy’s grand catch.

The jealousy and fury that ran through Malfoy’s veins made Draco feel as if he were being boiled alive in hot tar. He remembered Professor Snape in his own history complimenting him for his control, and Madam Pomfrey doing the same thing when he’d come to her with the hippogriff scratch. Had he mastered his emotions at _all_ , or did he manage to keep them mostly hidden behind a mask?

“You have no good words for your House’s Seeker, Mr. Potter?” Snape asked. Malfoy beamed. Draco could feel more memories, piling on top of each other, teaching him that Snape knew Malfoy wanted Potter’s attention, although he might not understand the reasons, and so Snape sometimes attempted to get it for him.

Harry turned his head and gave Snape a look of bright scorn, and no more. He never looked at Malfoy. He _had_ mastered his emotions, and no longer responded to Malfoy’s best taunts about his friends and parents. He only ever defended himself in times of physical attack, in fact.

 _This is what we’ve made him by this point,_ Draco thought, and controlled a sigh. Not that anyone would hear it in the depths of Malfoy’s mind, anyway. _Someone who sticks to what he considers “his own kind” and ignores the people he considers his enemies, because he knows it’ll drive them mad._

Then Malfoy’s teammates swamped him, clapping him on the back and yelling, and Malfoy tried to drown his sulkiness in their congratulations. Draco knew he would succeed only for a few hours. Then he would go back to dreaming of Potter, scheming for some way to make him look, make him speak, make him _notice_.

That was another result of having Harry in Slytherin, then: to make Draco more obsessed with him than he remembered being in his own history.

*

“It’s the Heir!” Malfoy paraded up and down the corridor, carrying Draco in his head because he had nowhere else to go, and pointing at the Petrified Mrs. Norris and the letters that gleamed on the wall. “He’s come back!”

Malfoy stopped in the middle of the crowd of students and waited for someone to notice him. Someone spoke, the one soft, hoarse voice that Draco had given up on hearing.

“What do you mean? Who is the Heir of Slytherin?”

Malfoy swung around and stared at Harry. Harry stood with his arms folded, his gaze fixed on the words as though he could make them stop being real that way. But Malfoy stared at him and said nothing, until Harry looked at him. Even Draco, who didn’t know as much about their relationship as he did about the relationship between himself and _his_ Harry, could see Harry had learned something else by being in Slytherin: the ability to convey contempt with a sideways flick of his eyes.

“No one knows,” Malfoy said triumphantly, and then backtracked as Harry started to turn away. “I mean, no one knows the _name_. But he’s someone who’s going to get rid of all the Mudbloods in the school! That’s what my father said! Return it to being just pure-bloods, the way it was in Slytherin’s time.”

Draco winced. He couldn’t blame this version of himself for believing what his father said, because he had done it, too. But he could wish he had bothered listening to the Sorting Hat’s songs. They said clearly that the other Founders had taught people who weren’t pure-blood. Malfoy ought to have weighed history against his father’s opinion, at least.

“Well,” Harry said, and turned away completely. He was already settling his shoulders and neck like he would have to haul a heavy wagon up a cliff.

“Potter, wait!” Malfoy called, rushing after him.

Harry didn’t walk any faster, but he didn’t turn around, either. Malfoy panted along beside him for a moment, and then decided that was enough and turned him around. Harry obliged, but his eyes had a slight glaze to them. Draco had seen the same look when he tried to explain Potions theory to Harry.

“What?” Harry asked.

“What are you going to do?” Malfoy glanced up and down the corridor. Draco had already seen there was no one near them, and tried to remember when he had started being that observant. _Not when I was a stupid little second-year obsessed with the Heir of Slytherin, that’s for sure._ He lowered his voice. “You looked like you were walking away to do something.”

Harry blinked at him, and for once seemed like he was human, not some monument to suffering and enduring Slytherin torments. “You said someone was going to destroy the people like me in the school. I’m going to stop him. Them. Whoever they are.”

Draco frowned. That hadn’t been the kind of thing _his_ Harry would have said. He was sick of the attitude people adopted towards him and wanted to avoid becoming a hero as much as he wanted to avoid those convinced he was on the Dark Lord’s side. Had they really taught this Harry to be a hero, the House and Housemates he hated so much?

“You can’t do that,” Malfoy said, shaking his head, and Draco mentally apologized to Granger and a few other people he’d met down the years who apparently couldn’t stand the sound of his voice. Heard from outside, that drawl _was_ annoying. “You can’t stop the Heir of Slytherin.”

“How do you know?” Harry asked.

Malfoy blinked for a bit, but as always when he—they—didn’t know something, he couldn’t admit that. “I just _know_ ,” he said. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? He’s powerful, and he Petrified someone already—”

“A cat,” Harry said, and his voice grew thick. “A bloody _cat._ You’d think he could have demonstrated on someone else if he was as powerful as all that.” He glanced over his shoulder, and grinned at something. “Besides, I doubt Mrs. Norris was Muggleborn.”

“You’re making fun of the Heir, and that’s _dangerous_ ,” Malfoy said, pointing one finger at Harry. “You ought to know—”

“Piss off, Malfoy,” Ron Weasley said, shouldering up to Harry and nearly knocking Malfoy off his feet. Of course Harry had been smiling at him, Draco thought, and shuddered, his jealousy twanging utterly in agreement with Malfoy’s emotions. “Harry, do you want to meet us in the library tomorrow? Hermione’s said that she knows some books on Petrification, and she thinks we could find something.”

“Sounds great, Ron, thanks.” Harry’s eyes brightened as he stared at Weasley, and Draco wasn’t surprised when he felt Malfoy’s arms cross in indignation. How come _Weasley_ could make Harry so intense and bright and interested when a _Slytherin_ who should be his best friend utterly failed to do so?

But it made sense. Harry could keep going when his whole House and his Head of House hated him because he had friends in other Houses. Draco should have known that Harry would always find his way to Weasley and Granger; it didn’t matter that they’d been Sorted elsewhere from him.

It made sense. But it didn’t lessen the pain, either Malfoy’s as he stood and watched Weasley drag Harry away, or Draco’s as he remembered the numerous times Harry had turned his back on him when they were boys to go with the one who had stolen _his_ friend.

*

“ _Serpensortia!_ ”

_I thought I was so intelligent._

And he had, Draco remembered, watching the snake that sprang from Malfoy’s wand and coiled writhing on the floor. What better way to show off his spellcasting abilities in the Dueling Club than by conjuring an animal the way that only fifth-years and up could supposedly do? And making it the symbol of his House, too.

He remembered Harry hissing at the snake in his second year, and not knowing what he was saying, or realizing that his words sounded like unintelligible Parseltongue to everyone else. Draco listened despite his gloom, because Harry rarely spoke Parseltongue even now. It didn’t fit his image of himself as someone who had no Dark gifts, who was good at the innocent sport of Quidditch and the Light-based Defense Against the Dark Arts.

But this Harry blinked once at the snake and then stepped directly into its path. He rattled off the hissing syllables like he was born to them, and _knew_ he was born to them, and reached one arm down. Draco remembered his commanding the snake to stop still instead of attacking one insignificant Mudblood—what was his name? Draco couldn’t recall—but this time, the serpent coiled around Harry’s arm and laid its head down in the crook of his elbow, giving something that might have been a whispering sigh.

Harry stared around the Great Hall. Everyone stared back at him. Lockhart dropped his wand. Snape stood as though Petrified by the basilisk. Harry’s friends had backed a step away and now hovered at the edge of the clear space preserved for the duel, looking at him. Malfoy stood still, too, but it wasn’t fear that thundered through his mind, although everyone other than Draco might think so.

There was jealousy, as usual, so familiar that Draco thought he would carry the word etched on his skin like ink made of acid by the time he exited Malfoy’s head. And there was hatred, and hope. Hope that Parseltongue might be learnable, that he could know how to do that and he and Harry could talk in snake-language.

Draco didn’t remember that hope among his own thoughts at the time. But then, this version of himself was different from him in a lot of ways. Stupider, for one thing.

He _knew_ that this incident made everyone think Harry was the Heir of Slytherin, and so he waited for the whispering to begin, and for Harry’s blank expression to come. He’d seen a lot of it lately, that was true, but that was mainly because it was the weapon Harry adopted to defeat Malfoy’s curiosity. This time, it would be real.

Instead, though, Harry said something else to the snake and wrapped it around his shoulders. Then he turned and walked out of the Great Hall, his steps so firm that Draco imagined he could feel them shake the ground.

He blinked, and blinked again when he noticed Harry’s friends slip out after him. _Go follow them,_ he thought as hard as he could at Malfoy. _I want to hear what happens!_

Malfoy made his own decision in the uproar that took over the Great Hall; no one was going to notice _him_ when they had something new to gossip about where it concerned the Boy-Who-Lived. And he wanted to witness Weasley rejecting Potter at last. That would serve Potter right, and show him where the _right_ kind of people, the ones who could appreciate his gifts, lived.

Draco nearly sighed when Malfoy tripped over the trailing edge of his cloak as he emerged from the Great Hall, but luckily, no one noticed. Harry was standing with his back to the Hall, and Weasley and Granger stood across from him, totally preoccupied with him. Or maybe with him _and_ the snake Harry kept petting.

“Everyone’s going to say you’re evil, you know,” Granger whispered. “Parseltongue is considered a Dark Art.”

“I know,” Potter said, and touched the snake’s neck and hissed something else when it tried to climb down his arm. Malfoy hoped it would attack Granger; Draco, with his previous experience of watching Harry command snakes, sighed again. Sure enough, the creature subsided and stared at Harry again.

“You _know_? Mate…” Weasley’s voice trailed off.

“I spoke to a snake once when before I came here,” Harry said, and his face went distant in a way that made Malfoy’s curiosity resonate with Draco’s. Draco, though, did know about the Dursleys; he just didn’t remember Harry telling him about a time he’d spoken to a snake in front of them. “When I got here, I remembered that and looked it up. Yeah, I know about Parseltongue.”

“Then you have to know what it’s going to make everyone think,” Hermione whispered. “That you’re evil, that you’re the Heir. You-Know-Who can talk to snakes.”

“I know that, too. There was this dream…” But Harry shook his head, and chased the words away. Disappointment clanged like a gong in Malfoy’s mind, and Draco would have liked to know about that himself—another tidbit that his _real_ Harry hadn’t shared with him. “But I’m still going to face up to this.”

“Why, mate?” Weasley whispered. Malfoy sniffed. The least the git could have done was speak _up_. “If you could hide it, if you could convince everyone that they were mistaken—”

“I’d never do that,” Harry said, his voice as flat as the bottom of a shoe. “I’m not going to pretend that it never happened, because they want to make up their minds about me. They want to put me in a category and have me stay there. They said I was a Slytherin, and they said I was the Boy-Who-Lived, and, and lots of other things.” His hands closed around the snake’s body; the snake hissed, and Harry sighed and let it go. “That’s not going to happen. They don’t get to choose who I am. _I_ choose.”

Malfoy sniffled and blinked and didn’t understand, but Draco did, and he stared.

_If this is the lesson that Slytherin taught Harry, to defend himself and think for himself, perhaps something good came of it after all._

*

Again the smooth flow of images, and this time it was Harry walking into the Slytherin common room, his head up, his eyes shining even though he had a bandage wrapped around his arm. For a while he stopped and stared at everyone staring at him, and then he sniffed and turned his back, walking towards his bedroom.

Malfoy stepped into his path.

Draco watched in silence through his eyes. He knew that shining in Harry’s face; it meant he had survived an encounter with the Dark Lord. And this time it would be the basilisk, and he got to see the aftermath where, in their own real second year, he had been reduced to watching from a distance.

But now, he did not know what would happen, and especially when Malfoy sneered and spat, “Well, gave Gryffindor a load of points again this time, Potty?”

Harry laughed. Draco started, and Malfoy flinched. Both of them had forgotten the sound of Harry’s laughter, or never known it.

“No,” Harry said. “Something better.” He turned, scanning for observers, and seemed satisfied when everyone except a few study-obsessed sixth-years looked up from their amusements. 

_He doesn’t collect eyes like that. He doesn’t want to be the center of attention that way._

But he had done it, with the snake and again here. Harry faced Malfoy again, and handed him a leisurely smile of the kind that even Draco at a few years older would have thought twice about confronting.

“I found the Chamber of Secrets,” Harry said, and ignored the growing whispers. “I confronted Slytherin’s monster, which was a basilisk, and defeated it. And you know _how_ I defeated it?” He leaned forwards until his nose brushed Malfoy’s.

“No,” Malfoy whispered. Draco wished for hands to slap the side of his head this time. Malfoy was falling for Harry’s tricks as though his father had never drilled him in half again as many.

“The Sword of Gryffindor,” Harry said. “Dumbledore’s phoenix brought me the Sword of Gryffindor.” He laughed softly, and held up his bandaged arm as though it was a badge of honor. “And the phoenix wept for me, so I survived the basilisk’s bite. The Headmaster said only someone who was a true Gryffindor at heart could have survived that way, or found the Sword.”

He gave them all a glance that, this time, was bright with scorn, and looked again at Malfoy. “Against that, what are you?” he asked softly.

 _He hasn’t accepted being part of Slytherin at all,_ Draco thought, stunned and with an aching at heart that he hadn’t expected. _He just—uses it when he wants to, and denies it the rest of the time. He still wants to be a Gryffindor._

A shiver of something like revulsion danced in the back of his head. His Harry never would have done something like that.

And then the world dissolved again, into silver mist and green, and if his younger self managed a reply, Draco never heard it. He doubted it had happened, though. The force of Harry’s eyes and smile was too powerful, too persuasive.

_He won. Somehow, even here where he should have been more like me and more like the Dark Lord, he won._


	4. Lust for Vengeance

This time, Draco wasn’t surprised when the mists cleared and showed him an older Harry standing with his Gryffindor friends in front of a hippogriff. The ritual seemed to show him fewer and fewer moments as each year passed, and it made sense that their third year would begin here, at a moment that had been significant to him, and, he hoped, to Harry. Considering that Harry had rescued Buckbeak later, it had to be important.

Of course, he couldn’t actually prevent Malfoy from insulting the hippogriff. He wasn’t looking forward to finding out how keenly he would experience the sensation of pain. But he watched Harry approaching the hippogriff and riding on its back with something akin to peace. By now, he could keep his emotions separate from the churning mess in the center of Malfoy’s skull. _He_ envied Harry and wanted his attention, all at once. Draco had to snort. Did he want to be Harry’s friend, or his steed?

Buckbeak landed, and Harry slid off his back, his face glowing. Malfoy being Malfoy, he took advantage of that glow to yank the moment back to himself.

“Better than a broom, Potter?” he called. “Of course, you probably wouldn’t _really_ know, seeing that you’re on the ground more often than I am.” Malfoy had become Slytherin’s Seeker last year, and Draco could feel his pride smoldering like embers in the back of his words now. As with every insult, he thought there was no way Potter could respond to it, no way he could do anything but fall to his knees and worship Malfoy’s greatness.

Draco wished for separate eyes and a separate hand, again, this time mainly so that he could slap the latter over the former.

Harry just glanced coolly at Malfoy and then looked away, saying nothing. Weasley asked him some question and he responded at once, and that made Malfoy’s emotions peak until Draco felt as if he were frying just from being near them. 

And then he did something else. Something different, something the ritual couldn’t have prepared Draco for, because he had thought he would see much the same events with only small twists here and there.

“Can’t be _that_ hard, if a Mudblood like Potter can ride it,” he said, and stepped forwards, not bowing to Buckbeak, not trying to do anything but stride up and force him to submit with the sheer strength of the Malfoy personality.

Buckbeak struck. Draco watched the wicked, slashing talons and the beak falling, and could picture it scooping out their eyes long before Malfoy’s astonishment had thawed into fear.

One claw did catch them, and send them rolling. Draco thought it was the only thing that saved their lives. Well, Malfoy’s life, anyway, and Draco’s own miserable, conjoined existence. He wished savagely that Malfoy’s head was turned in the right direction, so he could judge accurately why the great beak hadn’t yet landed on his shoulder and ripped his arm off.

Then Malfoy turned around, and Draco saw the reason.

Harry stood in front of the hippogriff, holding up his wand. The charm he’d cast created a huge, flexible net that gleamed like it was made of steel, which bent and wavered up and down in front of Harry, supporting Buckbeak’s weight. The hippogriff reared on his hind legs, his claws locked in the net, snapping and twisting, but nothing broke. Harry had sweat on his brow, his legs braced, one hand supporting the other as though the wand itself was a great weight.

He had saved Draco’s life. Malfoy’s life. And Draco felt his own thoughts align with Malfoy’s again, in the perfect clarity of awe.

The moment only lasted perhaps twenty seconds, until Hagrid could hurry over and restrain Buckbeak. Then the net disappeared as Harry let the spell fade, and he shook and covered his face with his hands. His friends hurried over to pat his back and escort him away, with the half-giant chattering anxiously about the hospital wing.

Malfoy didn’t even get to speak to him, to ask him why he’d done that.

Draco thought he knew why _his_ Harry would have done that. To spare someone, to keep unnecessary violence from happening. But he had no idea why a Harry who hated Draco so endlessly and especially would have.

He couldn’t wait to ask.

*

“I know you’re awake, Potter.”

Not the most diplomatic way of asking, perhaps, but Harry grunted and opened his eyes, darting one glance at the back of the hospital wing and one at the door into the corridor before he nodded. “Fine. What do you want?”

“I want to know why you saved me,” Malfoy said, the right words to pluck all the harmonics in Draco’s soul as well. This Harry wasn’t a mature warrior; Draco hadn’t even known he would know a spell like that. He probably hadn’t, at home. Malfoy folded his arms and glared with all the force of a Malfoy thirteen years old. “You didn’t have to. Your friends would say I deserved it.”

“You bloody well did deserve to be clawed up a little,” Harry said, and his face was locked. Draco saw him chattering and laughing with his friends so much that it was a surprise to realize what he could do as far as shutting off his expressions when he wanted to. _Another thing Slytherin taught him._ “But Buckbeak wasn’t going to do that, he was going to kill you. So I stopped him.”

“But why do you care if I live or die?” Malfoy demanded, wriggling in place on the stool.

“Because I’m not _Slytherin_ ,” Harry said, and loaded the word with a contempt that made both of them flinch.

“Slytherins would help each other,” Malfoy said, his voice small. Draco could feel how close he was to holding his breath, or just fleeing the room in tears. It was actually brave of him to stay and speak as he did. _Perhaps some of Harry’s Gryffindor nature has rubbed off on him, too._ “Why do you think we wouldn’t?”

Harry stared at him, and then moved a hand in a slow gesture down his body, as if inviting Malfoy to look at him. His body. His Muggle clothing. His blood.

“We would help you if you got in trouble,” Malfoy said, but he looked away, and Draco had to study the much less interesting pattern on the floor of the hospital wing—which was the same as it was back home—while he waited for Harry to respond.

“You warn me _not_ to get in trouble, is all,” Harry said at last, and his voice was so thick that Draco thought he must have been waiting to say this for a long time. “You mock me for being a Parselmouth. People from the House beat me up. You tell me that I shouldn’t have Gryffindor friends but tease me because I want them at all. Yeah, Malfoy, that’s _really_ welcoming.”

“It could have been different!” Malfoy snapped, turning back around. “If you’d ever acted like you were _proud_ of us instead of pushing us aside—”

“None of you were ever nice to me,” Harry hissed. “And that’s what it comes down to. I don’t give a—a _fuck_ about who your father is or how much money your family makes or why you love Slytherin. You weren’t nice to me, you never were, you laughed at me, and that’s the end of it.” He rolled away, and when Malfoy stared at him, all he could see was one shoulder in a jumper.

Draco shook his head, or did the mental equivalent of the gesture; he would take pleasure in doing a lot more than that when he was back home. He didn’t remember Harry as this sensitive and this easily conquered. He would always spit fire back at the teasing, and act like Draco was beneath him a lot of the time. Why was it so different here?

_Because then he had a whole House willing to support him. Because he didn’t have to learn wards to surround his bed at night. Because his Head of House would listen to him when he said he was having trouble in the subject she taught._

Malfoy rose slowly to his feet, biting his lip and never taking his eyes off Harry. At last he said, rapidly, “You don’t know why Sirius Black is hunting you, do you? You don’t have the least idea.”

Harry twitched, but didn’t turn over. Draco again regretted the lack of eyebrows to raise. _Well. I reckon this version of me sees the knowledge as a payment for saving his life, instead of trying to hurt him with it._

“He was your parents’ Secret-Keeper, and he betrayed them,” Malfoy said. “Killed their other friend and a bunch of Muggles doing it, too. And now he’s coming for you.” He paused. “I’d get out there and find him before he finds me. Shouldn’t be so difficult for you, with your skills at holding hippogriffs back. Maybe you could bind Black in the same net!”

Harry didn’t respond, and Malfoy slipped out, another emotion mingling among the ones he already felt. Draco wasn’t surprised that he didn’t recognize shame; it had taken years for Draco to understand it himself.

He kept looking back at Harry because Malfoy did, and wondered if anything could soothe the sharp ache in the middle of his heart. _Harry, I wish we were friends. I wish I hadn’t come back in time, or to this other universe, or to this vision, to see what I thought would be a more wonderful version of you. I wish…_

*

The edge of the Forbidden Forest. Draco recognized where they stood when the images slowed down again instantly, but he couldn’t help but wonder why they were here.

Malfoy looked around with his senses thrumming, and then paused when he heard voices. He ducked behind a tree and moved closer and closer to them, Draco listening to his heartbeat and trying to understand the situation.

Yes, Black had attacked Gryffindor Tower for some reason, and Harry had cast a spell that let him track the man out because he was so sure Black wanted to kill his friends, and no one had believed Malfoy when he tried to tell his professors that Harry was sneaking out of bed—except Snape, who was looking in entirely the wrong places…

But Harry had tracked Black to the Forbidden Forest, and now he was confronting him. Malfoy had come after him because, well, there was no way he could do this alone, and he might die with Malfoy still owing him a life-debt. Malfoy didn’t know what would happen then, but his father had told him it could be bad.

So he was here, listening as Harry spoke, his words edged with flame. Which meant Draco listened.

“I know you.” Harry’s voice was ragged, gasping. “I know who you are.”

“Do you?” Black’s voice was dangerous, so deep that Draco could imagine it as a growl over a bone. He didn’t remember ever hearing Black speak, but then, he would have no reason to. “You know why I came into the school, then. And that I’m your godfather.”

“What?” Harry said, and Draco recognized the tone as the one he used when he was knocked off-balance in the middle of a duel. It was the biggest weakness in the dueling part of Harry’s Auror training. Draco tried to estimate the distance between himself and Malfoy’s teeth, so he could grind them. _Idiot._

“Your parents chose me to be your godfather,” Black said, and Draco heard a shuffle that was probably Black coming closer to Harry, although Malfoy wasn’t near enough to see anything but shadows and the wavering light from Harry’s wand. “Harry? I didn’t kill them. I’m just hunting the one who did. Wormtail. The one who can change into a rat. You must have heard of us? The Marauders?”

“That name,” Harry began, and then Draco could feel him closing his eyes. Or he could feel the moment when his own Harry would have done that, at least, and he thought this Harry wasn’t different enough to do something else. “I—I heard of you. But I don’t know who Wormtail would be. What rat?”

“Weasley’s rat,” Black said. “Your friend Weasley.” His voice deepened and sharpened, becoming so like the bay of a hound that Malfoy shivered. “His rat Scabbers. Long-lived for a rat, isn’t he? I heard you talking once, asking how long he’d had him. And he’d had him for years, hadn’t he?”

“I don’t know,” Harry said doubtfully, but Draco—and even Malfoy—heard the trembling harmonics in the back of his voice and knew Black had him. Of course, in the real world, the untwisted world, Black had been innocent, but Harry couldn’t know that. This Harry, though, was alone, fighting against a group of people in his own House as well as the Dark Lord and his followers. He would want more allies than just his friends. He would jump at the chance to trust an adult, if he could.

_We made him more untrusting, and this is the result._

“Listen,” Black said, speaking rapidly. “Lupin. Remus Lupin, who taught you how to do the Patronus Charm? He’s Moony, because he’s a werewolf. I’m Padfoot, for my Animagus form, and your father was Prongs. He could change into a stag.”

“ _Really_?” And Harry’s voice soared with hunger, and Draco tried to listen to that more than the shock that jolted through Malfoy. He had suspected Lupin was a werewolf, but he wasn’t used to being right in his idle, malicious speculations.

“We used to run around the forest together, when Moony transformed and needed friends,” Black said, and his voice was full of longing. “God. Those were good times.” Then he glanced back at Harry, or so Draco thought from the movement of his head, as Malfoy peeked quickly around the tree trunk in front of him and saw their shadows. “Listen, Harry. I’m not asking you to trust me without proof. Bring me the rat, and I’ll show you. I know a spell that can force him to change back to human form.”

And that was all Malfoy needed to hear. Black was obviously mad, and he had been wondering all year how to pay Potter back for saving his life. He would do it by rescuing him from the madman whom he didn’t have sense enough to distrust.

“Hold it,” Malfoy said, and stepped around the trunk, aiming his wand at Black. “Get away from him, Potter. He’s more dangerous than you know.”

Black bared his teeth as though he was still in dog form. Harry’s eyes widened, but the next instant, he took a step forwards as if to get between them. That made a firework go off in Malfoy’s brain for reasons Draco hadn’t even considered; Harry might have been trying to protect Malfoy from Black, but it was more likely to be the other way around. Here was Malfoy trying to pay back a debt, and he was _still_ classed as an enemy.

“Get away from him,” Malfoy hissed.

“No,” Potter said. “I want to listen to what he has to say, and it makes at _least_ as much sense as the weird story you told me. Back up, and—”

“ _Black!_ ” Malfoy shrieked.

And that cry rang out all over the grounds, and the black shadows of Dementors began to flow towards them.

Draco could not remember the next few minutes, except for the Dementors that surrounded them, and the glowing figure that appeared at a distance, his wand aflame, and which cast a brilliant stag Patronus that charged them and made them scatter. He remembered Harry on his knees, and a sound like the flap of wings, and another like the long, trailing squeal of a rat. But the only thing he knew for sure at the end was that Black had changed into a dog and run away into the Forest, carrying Harry on his back, and the Dementors had fled as though a monster more terrible than they were chased them.

And then McGonagall found him on the edge of the Forbidden Forest, and Malfoy was _really_ in trouble. Draco would gladly have joined in with her scolding.

*

Harry walked the corridors with a strange, transcendent look on his face, compounded of both sorrow and joy. And for some reason, Malfoy noted as he went past, with Draco hovering in the back of his head, he was smiling at Blaise, and nodding to him. _Talking_ with him, although Blaise was Slytherin and the enemy.

Malfoy waited until Harry passed on. It was obvious Harry had rescued Black somehow, and Weasley’s rat was gone from the school, which had to be enough for Malfoy, because Harry would never tell him what had happened. But that was reason enough to talk to Blaise.

“Well, Zabini,” Malfoy drawled as he stepped up to him. “And what did you hear of the famous Harry Potter’s exploits?” Draco sighed in the back of his head; he would have offered something to trade for information as good as that. But Malfoy was still in the position where he thought people should gratify his whims for the mere pleasure of doing so, at least some of the time. He didn’t really consider anyone in Slytherin an equal, worth an equal exchange.

Blaise gave him such a bland look that Draco felt a stab of ice in his gut—his imaginary gut, not Malfoy’s real one. That was a sign that Blaise had indeed gained some real information, and things were different enough already that Draco had to guess what it could be. The real story of what had happened that night? Whether Harry had any hope of living with Black?

“I suggest,” Blaise murmured, “that you consider what value a solid shoulder and a listening ear offered at the right moment can be, rather than a snapping voice and a nose in the air.” And he turned away.

The rage made the mists that closed in turn black and red, and Draco was not sure whether that emotion was his or Malfoy’s.


	5. Yearning

“Harry Potter.”

Harry rose to his feet with an expression of such grim resignation on his face that Draco blinked, or tried to, and then remembered that the eyes he saw out of weren’t his to control. He hissed in irritation and wished Malfoy would stare at something besides Harry, so he could have some context for this image.

Then he saw the smoking Goblet at the front of the Great Hall, and the students from other schools clustered at their table, and realization hit him like a slap across the jaw. Granger would have been proud, he thought numbly.

_How is he going to survive the Tournament when even his own House hates him?_

Harry paced to the front of the room, his face so still that Draco had no idea what he was feeling. Malfoy fumed and was sure it was just pretend, that mask of his, because of course Harry Potter would be happy to discover a method to get past the Age Line. That he hadn’t shared it with anyone in Slytherin was just more proof of his selfishness. 

Draco sent hushing thoughts shooting at Malfoy like arrows, until he remembered the moment in the last year when Harry had spoken to Blaise. Then he had to swallow and wonder what other secrets Harry might be concealing. Malfoy didn’t know this Harry, didn’t understand him or his reactions, but Draco might not, either.

They took Harry into a small room off the Great Hall and probably explained his situation to him there, or explained that he couldn’t back out of the Tournament, or whatever the fuck else they needed to explain. When Harry came out, he had a distant look on his face, and left the Hall without attempting to come back to the Slytherin table. Malfoy got up and followed him as Dumbledore dismissed them, but not fast enough. By the time he came out into the entrance hall, Harry was nowhere to be seen.

 _I don’t care, I don’t,_ Draco told himself, as his head buzzed, picking up on the buzzing from Malfoy’s. _This is only a vision. Even if I feel concerned about Harry and want to help him survive, there’s nothing I can do to affect events._

But he could feel a dizzying, worrying prickle of emotion in the back of his head anyway. Something would go wrong—worse than it had the other years, when Harry had at least worked his way through the challenges flung at him, or helped Black to escape so that he could have a chance at a future. Something would be harder here.

*

The dragon roared, and reared. Draco tensed, something he needed no help from Malfoy to accomplish, since Malfoy was already so tense his shoulders hurt and leaning off the bench. The only difference was that Draco knew what to expect, and Malfoy didn’t. Any minute now, the broom would come hurtling down from the castle.

But Harry didn’t call his broom. Instead, for some reason, his gaze slid towards Malfoy for a moment, and his lips curled in something that Draco might have called a smile if it was more pleasant. Then he swung his wand and yelled an incantation that Draco lost in the frenzied shouting and another roar from the Hungarian Horntail.

The silver ropes that shot out of Harry’s wand manifested almost at once into a much bigger version of the glittering net that had surrounded Buckbeak when Harry kept the hippogriff from attacking Malfoy. They wrapped the dragon, which flapped its wings and tried to lift from the ground. Malfoy held his breath. Draco did the same, or wanted to. Surely the spell couldn’t hold against a creature much bigger than the hippogriff—surely something would go wrong with it, as Draco kept thinking it would with the Tournament in general—the net had never been made for something like this—

But the net held, and the dragon crashed back to the ground. Harry at once surrounded her front legs with another net that yanked them together, and joined up with the one around her wings so that she tripped when she tried to move. The dragon turned her head and opened her jaws, but not far enough to breathe fire before a third net trussed her there, binding away the teeth and the flames.

Harry bound the tail and the back legs. By now, he was swaying on his feet and sweating with effort, but he still managed a wind spell that lifted the dragon’s bound tail away from the nest. Once it was clear, he triumphantly stalked over, retrieved the golden egg, and held it up.

Again the crowd went mad, and Draco wanted to shake his head. That wasn’t nearly as special or effortless as the method his Harry had used to win the egg back home. And this Harry was still friends with Granger, whom Draco knew had helped him look up spells to use on dragons; surely he could still have come up with the idea of Summoning the broom?

Then Malfoy muttered something to someone about how the egg was the only Snitch Potter would ever catch, and new thoughts and realizations jerked into place in Draco’s mind.

 _Harry still loves to fly, but he’s not a Seeker in this universe. He doesn’t have the chance to practice as much. He probably doesn’t trust the broom around the dragon, and he wouldn’t want to risk breaking it._ Draco could just remember, like a distant dream, the time that Harry had told him the broom he’d used from third year on was a present from Black.

The judges didn’t agree with Draco or Malfoy, and gave Harry the highest points for that Task. Harry drooped on Granger’s shoulder and said something incoherent in response to someone’s request for a victory speech, and then they ushered him out of sight.

Blaise watched him go, and Malfoy watched Blaise and plotted murder. Draco wasn’t entirely sure that he didn’t agree.

*

"Th-thanks, mate."

Harry was wrapping the towel tenderly around Weasley's shoulders and smiling at him as if he were the most precious thing in the universe. Just like in Draco's world, he had gone back to rescue Delacour's little sister, but then hadn't paid much attention to her. He was talking to Weasley instead, peering at his arm to see if one of the tridents had scratched him, or casting Drying Charms on his hair. Malfoy was starting to wonder if he should be jealous of Weasley instead of Blaise, but then, jealousy about Weasley was a normal state of existence for him in the past three years.

The judges called out their scores, and then the group around the lake began to break up, Krum herding Granger in front of him and Delacour following with her arms around her sister as though she would never let her go. Weasley and Harry lingered behind, though, which Draco didn't remember from _his_ fourth year. And Malfoy didn't seem to have expected it, either, because he promptly slid out of his seat and hid behind a leg of the stands to listen as Harry and Weasley walked slowly past his hiding place.

A part of Malfoy understood, and hated, the notion that he was eavesdropping on their conversation instead of walking at Harry's side, in Weasley's place, the way he should have been. But certain desires were stronger than others, and so he remained, to hear the way Harry talked with his friends when he thought he was alone.

 _You heard that in second year, when he was talking about speaking Parseltongue to them,_ Draco thought in disgust. _You idiot, he would probably notice you more if you_ didn't _follow him around and obsess over him, the way he noticed me in sixth year._

But his advice would fall on no ears but his own, so in the end Draco sighed and paid attention to the conversation.

"I didn't know it would be me, you know?" Weasley shook one more trickle of water out of his hair, and then tilted his head and pounded some out of his ear. Malfoy sniffed, and Draco had to agree. Neither of _them_ would ever do anything so awkward or silly. One Drying Charm and it would have been taken care of. "Half thought you might find someone else under the water."

"Who?" Harry laughed, and Draco wanted the laughter, wanted it badly enough that it took him a moment to realize that was Malfoy's desire he felt, throbbing in his nonexistent chest and behind the eyes that watched Harry's every move. "Hermione was Krum's choice, couldn't have been her. And you know I don't value anyone else more than you, mate." He slung his arm around Weasley's shoulders and grinned at him.

That grin, Draco had seen before, and he felt none of the softness of Malfoy's mingled admiration and wonder. Harry smiled at Weasley like that, never at him.

Of course, Harry back in their world gave Draco _different_ smiles, a kind that he valued more than Weasley could ever value the gift just handed to him. But still, he wanted all the different kinds for himself. He was the one who had a right to them, Harry's lover--

_Not this Harry. And apparently, yours didn't value you enough at first to tell you that he was almost Slytherin, either._

Weasley stopped walking and turned to take Harry's shoulders. Harry blinked at him and shook his head.

"There isn't someone in your House you value?" Weasley asked, and gave Harry a little shake. "Honestly, I'm glad for you. Was starting to think that all the snakes would be awful to you forever, and we'd have to wonder whether the Hat was senile, putting you in the wrong place."

Harry flushed now, and reached up to brush one of Weasley's hands off his shoulders. "I don't know what you're talking about," he mumbled.

"Yes, you do," Weasley said, and put the hand back in the same place, and Harry just looked at him and then looked away, instead of snapping the way he would have if Draco had tried the same thing. If _Malfoy_ had tried the same thing, Draco reminded himself. He couldn't start thinking that they were the same person. He had already lived through too much of this bizarre alternate universe, and watched Malfoy fuck up too many times, for that. "Blaise Zabini? I know I've seen you talking with him, and working with him, and joking with him, and hell, all but _flirting_ with him."

Draco stilled. He could feel the star burning at the bottom of Malfoy's chest, ready to burst out of him, and the same one was in him.

He had thought Harry in this world might not be bent, because he hadn't thrown any admiring glances at other boys, and he ignored Malfoy instead of returning the attention with interest. But of course he might be bent, and simply choose someone else.

 _No. No. I--cannot watch that._ He reached out, and, for the first time, tried to locate the seam in the illusion, tried to end the vision and return to the ritual circle. He had said that he would pay any price, but he hadn't meant--

He hadn't meant that he would pay the price of watching Harry walk away from him, with someone else at his side.

But the ritual might have taken him at his word, and at any rate, Draco couldn't find the seam and couldn't change what was going forward. Harry was looking at Weasley in question, and Malfoy had remained hidden.

"You wouldn't mind if I was flirting with him?" Harry asked, and Malfoy rolled his eyes and thought disgusted things about Potter's need for his friends' approval, while Draco thought of a bland Muggle home from which all "abnormality" was shut out. "Really?"

"Of course not," Weasley said, and cuffed Harry gently on the shoulder, finally letting him go so they could walk on to Hogwarts. "Not when you'd have an ally at your back in the snake den." He hesitated. "Just be careful about breaking up with him if you date him, mate. I think having a scorned Slytherin lover could be even worse."

 _Yes,_ Malfoy's thoughts whispered, _yes, it could be._

Draco sighed. This Harry and Malfoy weren't lovers yet and might not ever be, not if it turned out that Malfoy was unable to do anything but scream at Harry for not being friends with him from the beginning. But he doubted Harry would become lovers with Blaise, either. This still wasn't too far from the universe he had grown up in, the _real_ one, and Blaise had stayed neutral during the war but hadn't been willing to assume a part on the front lines, either. If he was the boyfriend of the Chosen One, he'd have to.

It seemed a fragile reassurance to cling to as he watched Harry and Weasley walk back to the castle, comfortable with each other as always, and as Malfoy watched them and plotted, half-coherent ideas that faded away like dreams.

*

Harry staggered out of the maze that had been set up for the Third Task, carrying Diggory's body and with his face so pure white that Draco was amazed he was on his feet. Had he looked like that after the real Third Task? Draco could not remember. It seemed strange he couldn't, and he wondered if being in this Malfoy's head had poisoned or weakened his memories somehow.

His attention snapped suddenly back to this reality as Harry shoved Diggory's body at someone and turned towards the part of the stands where Malfoy sat. Malfoy rose to his feet, his skin flushing all over and his pulse hammering hard enough to make his throat hurt. He _knew_ it, he _knew_ that someday Harry would realize his mistake and turn to him for help, and he ought to have been better-prepared but that was okay, he was prepared now--

 _You fool,_ Draco whispered, watching Harry's dead eyes. _Nothing happened during his confrontation with the Dark Lord that could make him change his mind about you._

"Malfoy," Harry whispered, staggering to a stop and putting out his hand as though he would grasp something invisible for support. Malfoy reached for his hand, but Harry snatched it back and shook his head. "You have to know this. The Dark Lord was there, and there were--there were Death Eaters, and your father--" He closed his eyes and shuddered.

"I know who my father is," Malfoy said, and his voice and head vibrated like a bell with his fear. If Harry told everyone around him what Lucius Malfoy did, without any cushion, without any shield, and looking as he did now, then everyone might believe him. Or at least enough people to matter.

"Was." Harry blinked his eyes open, and they looked as if he had crawled through rainstorms, although Draco didn't think it was raining at the graveyard where the Dark Lord had taken Harry. Or, at least, it hadn't been from what he remembered. "He-- _he_ told him to capture me. Kill me. He ran at me, and he was saying something about how he was going to take Cedric's body away from me and destroy me, and--" He swallowed. His voice was dry, Draco could tell by looking at him, his hope gone, his body still shuddering with aftershocks of whatever had happened in the graveyard. "I meant to fire a Stunner. It was a warning!" Harry's voice rose. "But his head hit a gravestone, and his--his wand exploded, and then his head burst apart. I don't understand. I didn't hit him that hard. Someone else had to have been firing a curse at the same time, from another direction..."

His voice trailed off. In the intense, listening silence around them, Draco thought he could hear the rain beginning.

Malfoy drew his wand.

Someone came between them, the Moody who wasn't Moody, as Draco remembered from later, his own wand drawn and his face set in a grin. "Now, then, what's this?" he hissed in Malfoy's face, and grabbed Harry's arm. "Drawing your wand on our own _Savior?_ Your _father_ wouldn't be very proud of that, would he?"

Draco, out of the silent white maelstrom that had drowned him, didn't hear Malfoy's answer. He didn't see Moody drag Harry away, and he didn't know what the people around him--them--were saying. He sat down on the edge of the stands and put his head in his arms, or Malfoy did, and the world went past them, swift and without the one person who, until that evening, had most defined it for him.

Because of course it was his father who was the most important person in his life, not Harry Bloody Potter. How could he ever have thought otherwise?

Thoughts battered at the back of Draco's skull, tried to point out that the Harry who had destroyed his father in this universe was not the same one as the one he loved and had chosen to date, and it wasn't even _his_ father who had died, really--

But he had never thought that potential for violence lurked in Harry. Just as he had never thought the potential for lying or a romance with Blaise lurked in him.

Draco had thought it would be different, but he had also thought he would _understand_ the differences. Harry as a Slytherin would be smarter, more cunning, more ambitious, of course, and that would make him a person Draco could understand better and approve of more easily, someone who didn't have friendships with Mudbloods and Weasels. But what Draco saw instead was a warped funhouse mirror version of Harry, someone who could kill his father and announce it in front of everyone.

This time, when the mists of the vision swept in, Draco almost hoped they would never clear.


	6. Bitterness, Breathing Longing

Draco opened his eyes in the darkness of a bedroom. Malfoy was climbing out of bed, as he knew from the curtains swishing open and shut around him. He frowned for a moment and wondered what time it was. The dungeons had the option of permanent night if they wanted it, of course, but usually subdued light from the enchanted windows banished that. 

It must be real night now, though. The beds were still and quiet, and even the fire on the hearth burned down towards slow embers and ashes.

Malfoy spent a moment balancing himself against the nearest post of his bed, his eyes closed. Draco would have said he was praying, but he couldn't dignify the half-incoherent words spluttering and dying in Malfoy's mind with even that name. Then Malfoy drew his wand and turned towards the bed at the far end of the fifth-year Slytherin boys' bedroom. A line expanded by one from the five beds Draco was used to.

Malfoy walked with care, lifting his feet and setting them down without sound. He wore boots enchanted with the Velvet Charm to do that. He also used charms to calm the sound of his breathing. He had thought of everything, or thought he had.

On he crept, and on, making the bedroom seem much bigger than it was. Draco clung to the shifting currents of his mind, his own mind choked with dread. He kept telling himself that Malfoy might be on his way to a late-night conversation with Blaise, or a study session with Theodore. Slytherins stayed up late to work on their marks all the time, or conduct private threats and deals.

But at last Malfoy pulled back the curtains around Harry's bed, and Draco could fool himself no longer. And he began to think that Malfoy might actually have planned ahead, because no wards leaped to life when Malfoy stirred the curtains.

Harry lay curled up on his side, not the way that he slept in their bed at home, Draco noted. His head was hunched so that all Malfoy could see was a long sweep of hair, and he breathed slowly and steadily. He didn't have his wand out, which Draco blinked at, but his hand curled beneath his pillow in a way that probably meant he was clutching it anyway.

Malfoy stood there for a time, biting his lip. No tenderness filled his heart, but rather the thought of the trouble he would get in for assaulting the Boy-Who-Lived. But he reminded himself that the Dark Lord was back and his father was dead, and Potter wasn't invulnerable anymore.

He drew back his wand, and then plunged it down towards Harry. Draco could feel the tightening thrill in his stomach, the tug of his muscles. He had chosen a spell that would give his wand a knife's edge to deal with Harry instead of a more distant curse, because he didn't want the death to be impersonal.

 _You idiot, that'll give it away,_ Draco could have screamed at him, but still the dread stifled his thoughts, and the movement of Malfoy's arm was the only real thing in the universe.

Flexible wards flared into life an inch from the bed, catching Malfoy's arm and wand and throwing them high. Another ward flamed suddenly into being, running away from the ones that held Malfoy to form a pattern like the branching limb of a spiderweb. This one made Malfoy's arm tingle and go numb. His fingers opened, and the wand thumped to the floor. He opened his mouth to moan, but a third ward joined the other two and silenced any sound coming out of his lips.

Harry sat up and turned towards them.

Draco's own memories of fifth year were distant, but he was sure his own Harry's face had never looked this pale, or the black circles under his eyes been this big. Harry leaned close to them and hissed almost hard enough for Draco to take the words for Parseltongue.

"I thought this might happen," Harry said quietly. "And I understand why you hate me. That's why the wards waited until the last minute to catch you, because you might change your mind and go away. I didn't know."

He paused. There was no sound in the air between them but the soft rustle made by the sheets as he leaned closer to Malfoy. His eyes were enormous. Malfoy tried to shout something at him, but the Silencing Charm ward was still in operation, and Harry didn't seem to breathe at all until he had to speak again.

"That doesn't give you the right to kill me," Harry said. "I'll try to find out who slaughtered your father and let you have the first chance at him. Or I'll kill him myself, if I can. But you can't kill me for it." He reached up and touched something beside his pillow, probably the keystone in the web of wards.

The wards spat, once, and threw Malfoy backwards. He was still staggering when the curtains around Harry's bed snapped shut like the drawbridge of a fortress coming up, and he sat down hard on his arse. But the Silencing Charm stayed in place, and as Malfoy stood and tottered back to his bed, no one else so much as opened their curtains.

Draco was ready to shut his eyes long before Malfoy crawled into his bed and stared bitterly at the canopy, mind racing with plans that Draco longed to see shredded like rotten cloth. He hated the whole of this world. He wished he had never come. He dreaded the price the ritual would take from him.

But none of that mattered to Malfoy, who had spent the summer baking himself in his grief for his father and his own hatred of Potter. He would try again.

*

"What's this, Potter? Oh, no, don't tuck your delicate little hand away, let's see what we have here! A hero always has to be ready to answer questions from his fans, don't you agree?"

Harry stared at him with slitted eyes, and did nothing to prevent Malfoy from lifting his hand and turning it. Draco didn't know what to make of his gaze. Dead eyes, or deadly ones? It seemed unlikely to be a good thing either way, and he wondered if he could make Malfoy heed a warning if he shouted it hard enough.

For right now, he thought, no. Malfoy was bending solicitously over the hand that had _I must not tell lies_ carved in bleeding lines, and then he opened his mouth and crowed something that Draco didn't bother listening to. He stared at the words, resenting the jerk of Malfoy's head to the side that meant he could no longer look at them.

_Those were done with a blood quill. When did Harry get hold of one of those?_

Of course, Umbridge, bustling through the crowds to break up the little meeting and give Malfoy the secretive little smile that she gave to all members of her Inquisitorial Squad, provided the answer. Draco's Harry had mentioned detentions with Umbridge during their fifth year, painful ones. But he had never mentioned what the consequences were, or that they went so far. Draco felt a tingling, painful sensation that was almost physical, the only time he thought he had really felt one independent of Malfoy since he came here.

_Harry, when I come home--if I do--then you and I will have things to talk about._

"Of course, little Potty has to have his secrets," Malfoy whispered to him, dropping his hand, as Umbridge stepped away. "But let me give you some advice, Potter." He stabbed a finger at the bleeding words, but stopped short of touching them. Draco wondered if that was from fear of contamination by Dark magic, fear of Harry's friends attacking him--they were already hastening towards them--or fear of what Harry, snake-still, might do. "Heed _that_ piece of it."

"You always give such good advice, Malfoy," Harry said, and his voice was dead. Not mild, not cool, but dead. "I'll be sure to remember it."

Malfoy took a step away despite himself, then sneered and swept down the corridor in a billow of robes. But he looked back once over his shoulder, probably because he had to, and Draco studied Harry's face and eyes as intently as he could in that short shard of time.

_That's what it is. He's retreated into himself, and everything anyone tries to hurt him from now on is just going to bounce off that armor. They can cause him pain, but he'll take the pain and boil it into anger._

Weasley and Granger planted themselves at Harry's sides in the next instant, talking excitedly. He nodded to them, and pasted a smile on his face that would conceal his eyes from someone with no real incentive to look, which Merlin knew they should have had. Then his friends marched him down the corridor like a bodyguard.

Harry walked, but he didn't seem to breathe. Draco felt a sensation like a shiver touch him this time.

_I don't know what's going to happen._

*

"You have to be vigilant, you know that." Umbridge gave Malfoy a sweet smile while her hand played with something small and silvery on her desk. Draco thought it might be a piece of unicorn horn, and shuddered. He didn't want to know what she had done to get that.

Malfoy, of course, noticed nothing, and was only happy that someone in the school agreed with him on the relative unimportance of Potter. "Of course," he said, and paused dramatically. "Madam High Inquisitor, what is your position on the wrongs that people did before we became enlightened? Like last year, when people did something they thought was _right_ under the dominion of the old fool?"

Umbridge blinked her toad-like eyes and giggled. "Oh, Mr. Malfoy, you can speak outright, you know. _We_ know the truth. Dumbledore encouraged people to do things they shouldn't have, didn't they? He was a _very_ naughty boy. And the people who followed him were naughty as well." She leaned forwards, her expression suddenly grave. "And we all know that naughty people don't truly change. Not until they're taught better." Her face went soft and dreamy.

_She's thinking of Harry and using that awful quill on him, I just know it._

Malfoy, though, nodded and smirked. "Yes, Madam High Inquisitor. And I know someone who's kept being naughty this year, and hasn't listened to your instructions _at all._ But last year his crimes were different. I was just wondering if it would be a good idea to bring up the past at all, or to let bygones be bygones." He looked demurely at the floor, in a way that would have made Draco want to vomit if he hadn't felt that way already. _Pity I don't have a stomach to vomit with._

"It's always a good idea to remember the past," Umbridge intoned. "To remember our _history_ , so that we don't forget what happened the last time we tried to get along with Muggles." She leaned towards Malfoy again and lowered her voice to a hoarse whisper. "As long as you know that this person has done things that aren't adequately punished by the restrictions that he--hem hem, I mean _they_ \--are suffering already, then I think you should punish them as you see fit."

" _Thank_ you, Madam High Inquisitor," Malfoy said, and bowed, and all but clicked his heels together as he left Umbridge's office and ran down the corridors in search of Harry. Draco clung to the back of his mind and closed his eyes, feeling the pleasure and anticipation race all around him like rivers of blood.

_Harry shouldn't have killed his father. But he shouldn't be doing this, either._

Malfoy came out into the seventh-floor corridor where he knew Potter and his friends were spending a lot of their time, and looked around. _There._ The perfect victim. Ginny Weasley was walking towards him, her wand gripped in her hand, when the latest Proclamation said students weren't to carry their wands like that.

It was nothing, just a little use of a legal variant of the Imperius Curse, and she opened the door for him while tears ran down her face. Malfoy discounted the tears. She would be properly punished soon, and he was being nicer to her than the High Inquisitor would be.

Draco wondered if Harry would care. In the real world, yes, because he had dated Weasley for a time. But this Harry seemed more interested in _Blaise_ , of all people, and Draco doubted that Malfoy needed to worry about any special retribution because of who he had chosen to curse.

It was everything else he had to worry about.

The door swung open slowly, and shocked faces turned towards them. Weasley started struggling under Malfoy's hold, and Malfoy stepped past her, into the room. His attention was on Potter and his mind was on Potter, and the slow thunder of his heart in his ears meant nothing. He wasn't afraid. He and Potter were going to have it out, that was all, and Potter's friends wouldn't interfere if they knew what was good for them.

He laid out his terms. "You duel me, Potter--single combat, no cheating, no interference from your followers--and I don't tell the High Inquisitor about your little _army_."

Harry had no expression on his face as he stepped forwards to accept the challenge. Granger tried to hold him back, and Draco silently willed strength to her arm. This was different, after all. He had no particular reason to hope that it would lead to a duel, although a small, squirming part of him had always been curious to know what would happen if he and Harry fought with no barriers between them, no holding back.

But Harry shook off Granger's arm and stepped forwards, bowing to Malfoy. Malfoy bowed back, and the tide of joy and hope flowing around Draco made him relish the emotions for the first time since the first year he had spent in the vision. Perhaps this would settle things, render Malfoy's grudge less poisonous, and enable him to move past his grief for his father.

Someone set up shields around the center of the room, so they could duel without hitting other people. But Draco doubted Malfoy would have thought of that, anyway, despite his cursing Weasley. Harry was the only one in the room who mattered to him.

Malfoy raised his wand. His head rebounded with knowledge of Dark curses like the one he had used to gain entrance here, and some more that the Inquisitorial Squad had learned. All the silent staring eyes pressed in on him, no matter how much he hated or discounted those people, and he was determined to give them a show.

Harry's eyes were empty and curiously focused. Not dead now, Draco thought, with a stirring of unease that made him wish he could separate himself from Malfoy's body, but not alive in the normal sense either. It was as if he saw Malfoy as an obstacle to the race he had to run, and would enjoy the chance to burst past him and continue running.

Malfoy opened his mouth, and the first delicate syllables rolled off his tongue.

Harry hissed something in Parseltongue. A sentence. No, a _spell_. Snakes formed from the air, dropping on Malfoy's head, draping themselves around his neck and his arms, pulling tight. In three seconds there was an adder with its fangs pressed against his cheek, a python choking the air out of his throat, and a cobra wound about his leg, so tall that it could rear at exactly the level of his eyes.

Light-headed, Malfoy dropped his wand. The cobra opened its mouth, and the tongue flickered out. Draco recognized the shape of the fangs, as those of a cobra that could spit venom that would blind its victims, and he knew from the fear chasing through Malfoy like a second heartbeat that he did too.

Luckily, it only took Malfoy a moment to figure out what Potter was waiting for. "I surrender!" he squealed. "I surrender!"

Harry rolled his wand between his fingers and his tongue between his lips, and the snakes were gone. He turned from Malfoy without a glance.

As if he was an obstacle to be knocked down. As if he wasn't _important_.

Malfoy snatched his wand again and blasted off a curse at Harry's back, black rage and grief constricting his limbs as much as the snakes had ever done.

A Shield Charm snapped into existence--and Harry must have cast it without turning around, since the barriers around the center of the room kept his friends out, still--and Harry gave a casual hiss. The cobra popped into existence in front of Malfoy again, and spat into his eyes.

The poison burned so much that Malfoy began to scream before his sight went dark. Harry kept walking away, the sound of his footsteps brisk and unconcerned, and Malfoy was left to stumble his way to the door of the room on his own, while Harry's voice had already begun to give instructions on spells again.

Draco clung to the back of Malfoy's mind, dazed and trembling.

*

The poison turned out to be temporary; by the time Malfoy could get to Umbridge, it had worn off entirely. But it had its effect, and Malfoy kept away from Harry for the rest of the year, turning the other way and pretending not to see him if he entered a room. Draco considered that might be for the best.

 _He_ would find it hard to look at Harry again, poison or not.

With the end of the year came a greater darkness in Harry's eyes, and then the rumor that Sirius Black had died in the Ministry. Malfoy, as one of the people who knew what Black had been to Harry, settled down one evening to write a taunting letter. But the ink dried, and the quill fell from his hand.

The mists surged in around them again as Malfoy made a determination. His father was gone. Malfoy's own efforts to avenge him had failed. So he would go to someone who _could_ help him. He would go to the man who had lost a loyal servant when Lucius Malfoy died, and might be interested in the services of the son.

He would become a Death Eater.

Draco said nothing, thought nothing, as the mists took him away, because what was there to say?


	7. Desire Darkens

Draco blinked and looked around. He had expected the next scene to be the moment when Malfoy took his Death Eater vows, but instead, he stood-- _they_ stood--inside a rocking train compartment, staring at Harry, who had his Invisibility Cloak draped over one arm and the weariness of the world in his eyes. 

"So I came to see if you would still take my hand," Harry finished. Draco wondered why he had missed the rest of the conversation, but presumably the spell had decided that it wasn't important. "The war's starting, and I don't need an enemy in my own House. Actually, I _never_ needed that, but I underestimated how much of this was my own fault." He held out his hand. "Truce?"

Draco could feel the contradictory currents in Malfoy's head, the way he longed to take Harry's hand and to spurn it at the same time. The shadow of his dead father hovered at his shoulder, the shadow of his living mother in his head. The Dark Lord had warned him that he must complete his task to kill Dumbledore or Narcissa would die, but Malfoy wasn't worried about that. He knew he could do it, that he had the perfect way to do it, and that no one would ever blame _him_ for it.

But, of course, the people who were important would know.

Draco wanted to slap a hand over his face. He wanted to beat Malfoy's head in. He wanted to take over Malfoy's mouth and tell Harry that the offer was accepted, as long as Harry didn't mean the truce to be perfectly neutral, because this was the chance to pursue friendship, and more than friendship.

But Malfoy, being Malfoy, cast a Tripping Jinx on Harry and then took a step forwards as he sprawled on the floor, lifting his boot to smash Harry's nose in. Draco recoiled from the slickness that traveled through his head, hot as vomit, because it too closely echoed his own emotions the time that he had broken Harry's nose in sixth year.

This Harry wasn't immobilized, though, and was also a better fighter than Draco thought _his_ Harry had ever been. He rose to one knee and cast a jinx of his own in the same moment. A silver net like the ones he had used to hold Buckbeak and his dragon bound Malfoy to the far wall of the compartment.

Harry stayed on one knee, but from the way he looked at Malfoy, Draco knew no one stumbling on the scene would ever be stupid enough to imagine him as submissive.

"I see the mistake I made was in giving you too much credit, in thinking that you would _want_ to be friends, or something close to it," Harry said without expression. "That's fine. I won't make either kind again." He turned and walked away.

Malfoy finally had to call on Blaise to help him get free. Blaise halted and stared first, and Draco was utterly sure that he was making mental notes so he could look at this in a Pensieve memory later. Malfoy stared back and curled his lip, feeling the Dark Mark burn beneath his shirt. He wished he could show it off and watch Blaise leap to do his bidding, but the Dark Lord had bid him keep his true allegiance quiet for now. Later would come the time to declare himself and shine forth.

Blaise snipped the strands of the net with a charm that Malfoy didn't recognize, and Draco didn't, either. Harry had probably taught it to him.

Draco thought he was the only one to understand the true nature of the sickness that flitted through Malfoy's mind with that revelation.

*

Malfoy chuckled breathlessly to himself as he finished bottling the potion and stood back from it. The Dark Arts were coming in useful to repair the cabinet he had discovered in the Room of Hidden Things, but it was his potions-making skill that would lead to the death of Dumbledore. 

Of course, it wouldn't have if Potter hadn't proven so good at Potions, unexpectedly, in their sixth-year class, but that was fine. His trust that something would arise, that he could use a potion to cast the blame on Potter, had been justified after all.

Draco, just to see what would happen, tried pounding his hands against Malfoy's skull and screaming. It did nothing, of course. 

Malfoy corked the potion gingerly and added a few Non-Breakable Charms to the glass of the vial, then started towards the kitchens, whistling under his breath. Malfoys understood something about ordering house-elves around, and he would find one he could intimidate into putting the poison in the Headmaster's morning pumpkin juice. It was the same poison that Potter, in the presence of witnesses, had confirmed he was good at brewing.

Draco watched the lightning-like thoughts dart past him. So much brilliance, so twisted that Draco felt sick and faint, much the way he had as he watched the dead look in Harry's eyes. Things would be better if they could change, if Malfoy could apologize, if he could convince Harry he was sincere...

Then again, if Harry had not killed Malfoy's father, then things would be different. If he had accepted the Hat's choice of Slytherin instead of reacting against it, things would be different. If he had listened to Malfoy when he tried to apologize and warn him about Black--his intentions were only misguided, not evil--then perhaps they would be friends. Or lovers. 

And Draco would not feel as though he had come back for the worst of reasons and that seeing these things might damage his memory of reality forever.

*

Malfoy half-stood up in his seat, staring. The poison should have acted on Dumbledore immediately, but he had already drunk half his cup of pumpkin juice and was chatting to McGonagall, his face still bright instead of bright blue. Malfoy's hands clenched on the table, and if he didn't hear the rattle of silverware, then Draco did.

And he felt something else. A moment later, Malfoy's perceptions caught up, and he turned his eyes in the right direction.

Harry, sitting at the Gryffindor table as always, watched him with a gaze as cold as a winter wind.

_He knows._

The panicked Malfoy didn't take the time to think how that could be true, or to consider what would happen if he ran away now. He simply turned and pelted out of the Great Hall, ignoring the confused shouts that followed him. Draco did catch a glimpse of Blaise on the way, sitting perfectly still and blank.

Malfoy ran to the Room of Hidden Things and panted out the instructions to get in, then slammed the door behind him and leaned against a stack of oddly-shaped boxes. His heart rattled and raced. He clenched his hands in front of him, and Draco winced as tiny streaks of blood trickled down the palms.

He had attempted to poison Dumbledore, and it hadn't worked. Now he had to wonder whether Potter knew, as well. And he had to come up with a different plan to fulfill his assigned task, or his mother would be hurt.

He wished he had never decided to become a Death Eater.

 _Yes, that's the right reaction, at last!_ Draco thought of happiness and helpfulness as loud as he could, on the chance that Malfoy might hear him. _Now go to Snape and ask him for help, or go to Dumbledore and admit what's going on. Hell, at this point you could probably talk to Harry and he'd do as much for you as he would for anyone else in trouble, although no more._ Draco felt the ache pulse through him that Harry would do no more, but he couldn't blame him at this point.

But Malfoy straightened up, and wiped the saliva of his own fear away from his mouth, and regarded himself with disgust in a mirror hanging on the wall of the Room. Then he turned back to the Vanishing Cabinet. He would miss Potions, but what did that matter, when Snape was jealous of him and no one in his House cared about him?

Draco watched, because he had no choice, and once again felt the sickness pass through him, this time in a bolt as clear as Malfoy's thoughts sometimes were. This was, he thought, the moment that predestined the end.

*

"Malfoy! Wait up."

Malfoy's shoulders tightened with a tension that hurt Draco, but he kept walking. Of all the times for Potter to decide he had to speak with Malfoy, it would be _now_ , right after Malfoy had slipped a different poison into the ale that Dumbledore would receive in a week's time. His plan for casting blame on Potter would have to wait, but at least he knew that this one was likelier to work.

Then Potter's hand fell on his shoulder, and Draco and Malfoy flinched at the same time, a flinch that swung them around and out from beneath the extended hand. Panting, they stared at Harry, who took a step back out of reach and lifted his empty left hand. His right one rested low, on his wand.

 _Don't do that,_ Draco whispered to him, fainter than a breeze or a dream. _You can't do that and expect him to take you seriously. Please, move your hand away, show that you can appreciate him, show that you can--_

"I spoke to Dumbledore," Harry said, and kept his voice lulling and soft, at the same moment as his hand moved, casting a spell around them that assaulted Malfoy as a distant buzzing in his ears. Draco knew what it was, by the same route he knew the source of Harry's sudden brilliance in Potions, but Malfoy had no notion, and Harry should have explained. As it was, though, Malfoy was staring at Harry and imagining the death of his father over and over again, rather than concentrating on the spell. "He says that he knows what's going on, but for some reason he won't stop it." Harry took a deep breath. "Please. Tell me what it is. It might be that I can get you sanctuary with--with other people, even if Dumbledore doesn't care."

Malfoy took a single long step forwards. "I hate you," he whispered.

Harry didn't move, but his eyes grew a shade more still. Draco imagined he was more used to such declarations than _his_ Harry was, or at least had more practice controlling his emotions.

"I hate you, and I always will," Malfoy whispered. "You aren't concerned about _me_. You're only interested in proving that you're not a Slytherin, that you're a bloody _Gryffindor_ , and the Hat was wrong."

Harry curled his lip, and the distant look Draco had seen throughout most of the last two years came back into his eyes. "God, you think I care about that, now? There are more important things going on than--"

"That's the basis of _all_ this!" Malfoy screamed, waving an arm, and for once he might have been voicing Draco's actual thoughts. "You started out wanting friends in other Houses because the _one_ you'd made disapproved of you being in Slytherin. Then you decided to ignore us and walk away from us, and not report the attacks made on you like a _normal_ person because you decided that your Head of House wouldn't listen to you."

"Well, he wouldn't," Harry said, his voice low although his cheeks and eyes both glittered bright. "Snape hates me, you know that."

"And did you make any effort to make him hate you _less_?" Malfoy took a stride forwards, and Draco could feel the pulse of blood in his temples. "Like a good Slytherin, or at least someone who's interested in the people around him as human beings, did you make any effort to accept your placement and make friends? No, you just discarded us all, and decided you were a Gryffindor and that was that."

The only sound was Harry's rushing breath.

"You don't care about us, you don't care about anything to _do_ with us, and that makes this your fault," Malfoy pushed. "You could have done something, but no, you'd rather act like the freak you are and--"

Harry lashed out. Draco couldn't track the motion of his wand, it was so fast. It landed on Malfoy's cheek, and pain bloomed behind it, the sharp sting of a cut like one that might have been made with Malfoy's Potions knife. Malfoy yowled and clapped his hand over it, staggering back.

Draco felt skin and flesh tearing as he moved, as the body he was sharing moved. Harry had marked Malfoy somehow, had scarred him, had hurt him.

Malfoy would never forgive that. Especially not if the mark was permanent. The only marks like that he wanted to bear on his body were the ones he chose, such as the Dark Lord's.

"Go away and think about this some more," Harry said, his voice echoing around Malfoy and filling the corridor with a red haze of pain. "For some reason, Dumbledore won't save you, but I think I could. If you cared. Find Ron if you want to be safe, though. I don't think I could stand to look at you again."

He turned away. Malfoy's head lay on the floor, and his eyes were trained at the level of Harry's boots, so Draco couldn't see much of Harry himself. But he did think he saw the hand dangling at his side, clutching his wand, shake before Harry stuffed his fist back into his pocket. 

That was the closest they would come to an incident in the bathroom this year that left Malfoy bleeding on the floor, Draco sensed. Perhaps Harry had been tempted to use _Sectumsempra,_ but had restrained himself at the last minute. Malfoy would never know how lucky he had been.

And because he would never know, he climbed to his feet with a deadly wrath against Potter in his heart, and all the more determination to succeed in the tasks that the Dark Lord had assigned him. Potter couldn't stop him, _wouldn't_ stop him. No one would. He would finish his task and succeed to highest acclaim. He had to.

His mother's life and his own pride depended on it, and Draco, watching that mixture of thoughts, knew that Malfoy himself could not have said which was more important to him.

*

"Surrender, old man."

Malfoy had imagined those words coming out as more dramatic, Draco knew. To Draco's experienced ear, it sounded as though the wind simply caught them and whipped them away. And the Headmaster, braced against the wall of the Tower, his hands spread out as though to keep himself from toppling, his face green and grey with pain, only smiled at him.

"There still might be sanctuary found for you, Draco," he breathed, and Draco flinched back before he remembered that no one here could possibly know who he was and how he had come there, that he was there only as an observer. "If you would lower your wand and come to our side, we will treat you better than the Dark Lord would. Did you think he intended to leave you alive, that you were not to be punished for your mother's trying to find some way out for you? Or for your father's betrayal during the years since the war?"

"My father was _not a traitor!"_ Malfoy's voice soared on the wind this time and snapped like a flying banner. "Stop saying that!" Then he fell silent and bit his lips. Draco could feel the uncertainty there about whether he was talking to Dumbledore or himself.

"Of course I will, Draco," Dumbledore said. "But you must understand how Voldemort will view it." His eyes flickered to the side, to the curving scar on Malfoy's cheek that he had stared at for hours in the mirror without any idea of how to remove it. The curving dark scar, twisted back on itself like a snake.

" _Shut up!"_ Malfoy screamed, and lurched a step forwards. Draco, listening through Malfoy's ears that were otherwise preoccupied at the moment, heard pounding footsteps on the steps behind him.

_Oh, please. No. Not this._

But it was. He had to watch again as Professor Snape killed the Headmaster, and then pulled Malfoy into fleeing, hissing in his ear that he had known what Malfoy was doing all along and that they would be caught and _killed_ if they stayed here. Malfoy didn't even get to enjoy the sight of the Death Eaters in the school, the knowledge that he had let them in, because half of them fought the students and half of them leered at him with horrible knowledge in their eyes.

Behind them came a different set of footsteps, different from the kind that had pounded up the Tower stairs. Despite the way that Snape pulled at him, trying to get him to run, Malfoy turned around and looked back. 

Potter was coming after them, his head bowed slightly as though against strong wind, his eyes so calm that it made Draco shiver to see them. He had seen Harry look like that when he killed the Dark Lord, and never since. This Harry looked at Snape and cast a single, quiet spell that made the grass between them come alive with snakes.

It exploded into a duel, the way it had in Draco's memory, but quieter. Harry didn't yell; he simply fought, and dodged Snape's spells, and cast them back, including some spells that Draco knew now came from the Half-Blood Prince's book. When Snape at last flung him back with a Blasting Curse and turned to run into the woods with Malfoy, Draco could see his chest heaving up and down and his face blood-red with rage, and knew that this Harry had surprised Snape.

And worried him.

But Malfoy's head still swam with other emotions, and again Draco was grateful for the mist that closed in around them, that spared him from more sights he would undoubtedly have found as painful.


	8. Undesired and Unwanted

Life was horror.

Draco knew that much from the compressed images that passed in front of him, black and grey, as the vision shuffled through them in search of Harry. There were still faces and glimpses when Malfoy raised his wand to a cowering Muggle and his mother with her hands clasped over her face. Draco was actually grateful that he didn't have to see more than that, that the vision was so focused on Harry he didn't know exactly what this Malfoy's Death Eater life was like.

Not what he had envisioned it being, that was clear. At least something had cut through the film draped in front of his eyes, created by his own self-absorption and arrogance. But Draco, watching the way Malfoy reeled back from one memory before he was on his way to the next, was not sure it was worth the price. 

Then the pictures began to slow, and Draco knew they were coming back to the Slytherin Harry he had come here to understand. And enjoy, although he didn't think that verb applied anymore.

Suddenly the light blazed out of the vision, and Malfoy was standing in the middle of the entrance hall at the Manor, staring transfixed at the boy in front of him. He had a complicated glamour on him, one that thinned the lightning scar almost to the point of invisibility, and his hair had darkened and grown longer, and his skin was paler. He looked almost like he could be Professor Snape's son, as a matter of fact.

But those green eyes were still the same. Through Malfoy's mind there pulsed, like an echo, the wonder that Potter hadn't tried to change them. Draco pushed back automatically with the knowledge that eyes were the most difficult part of the body to use a glamour on, but Malfoy didn't hear him, of course.

"Is that him, boy?" Fenrir Greyback's hand gripped Malfoy's shoulder, and ignored his flinch away. The werewolf didn't care _who_ he manhandled, although he was more likely to make "pretty" comments under his breath about the Muggle girls they captured. "You were in his House for six years. You _must_ know."

Malfoy's mind struggled and heaved. His hand rose to touch the scar on his cheek, the one that Harry had gifted him with. Draco could hear the opposing sets of words that rose up in his throat. On the one hand, he thought Potter might be his only chance, and his mother's, to survive the war; on the other hand, Potter had scarred him, and Malfoy wanted to see him suffer.

 _That's not important right now,_ Draco thought, and wished that he had cast a sort of telepathy spell before he came into the vision, or at least negotiated with the ritual for the right to communicate with his younger self. _Can't you see that? The only important thing is getting free of the Dark Lord and returning to the status quo we were in before, not making up for old scores!_

Malfoy opened his mouth. Draco didn't think even _he_ knew what words would emerge until he spoke. Draco certainly didn't. "Yeah, that's him."

Harry continued to look Malfoy in the eye as the Death Eaters exploded around them into delighted howls--literal ones, in Greyback's case. Draco saw no flinching, no withdrawal, in those eyes. He wondered why for a moment. Harry in this universe had the right to feel that Malfoy had betrayed him, if only because they had shared a House, if not a friendship.

But then he realized. Harry had already withdrawn as far as he possibly could. That Malfoy would do such a thing was a setback, but no surprise. Harry had already taken all compassion away from Malfoy, and all expectation that he would stay true and not betray him, last year.

And that must mean he had some plan here, that he wouldn't depend on Malfoy's faithfulness to save him--

"Harry!"

A figure dressed in dark robes broke from the Death Eaters ranks to the side. Draco hadn't seen him in the memories, but then, those memories had gone past so fast that that wasn't really a surprise. And so, it hadn't happened that way in the real world. What did that matter? If Malfoy and Harry could have different fates, surely other people could, as well.

None of that eased the clamor in Draco's head as he watched Blaise turn on the Death Eaters, cursing several of them, including Greyback, before they realized what was happening, and Summoning Harry's wand back. He tossed the wand to Harry. Harry caught it and nodded once to Blaise, his smile on his face like a fire made of sunlight.

That smile had been Draco's, the day he finally got the courage to go up and introduce himself to Harry like a normal person, and ask for a date. Harry had smiled at him like that because, he had confessed later, he had hoped Draco would take the initiative, but he knew he didn't have the right to expect it, and he hadn't thought they could ever move past the sticky shadows hanging between them--

Draco thought all that as he watched Blaise and Harry work together, in a way that proved Blaise must have attended Dumbledore's Army or at least some training sessions in secret, to surround Harry and his friends with rings of fire and snapping blades and make it out the door. Malfoy sat on the floor where one of Blaise's curses had tossed him and felt nothing but numbness, eating into his head like ice. 

Then the Dark Lord came, and the vision thankfully closed in, because Harry had left the Manor some minutes before, and Draco had no desire to see what would happen to those of them left behind.

*

It was all he could think of, the driving desire that made him follow Potter into the room he was looking for. The room Malfoy had been working in, trying to find a solution to the problem of letting the Death Eaters into the castle. Malfoy had no idea what Potter wanted in that room, and less intention of caring. What _mattered_ was that he could capture Potter again, take him to the Dark Lord, and make up for his failure in the Manor--the failure that had seen his mother tortured--that way.

Draco traveled in his head, a prisoner, and tried to shut his eyes regularly, when he thought it would help. It never did, because Malfoy just kept moving along, and Draco wasn't sure he could make him less stupid even if Malfoy could hear him, but he tried.

And then Malfoy was saying something in a high, shrill voice that Draco didn't bother listening to, because he was watching Harry's face. Harry gazed at Malfoy with nothing in his eyes, as usual. Even as Draco watched, Harry turned his head to the side, and his eyes locked on something in the distant wreckage of items. He smiled, and the gesture was bright and remote. He didn't care about the boy babbling in front of him. That was the worst, that Malfoy was so utterly irrelevant to him, despite being in the same House.

At least Blaise wasn't with Harry and his merry band. That was the only consolation Draco could take away from this confrontation.

The universe hadn't changed Crabbe, who still cast the Fiendfyre, and the flames leaped up all around them. Lions charged at Malfoy, who flinched. Crabbe screamed, and Draco wished more than ever that he could close his eyes, as he watched his friend dying for the second time in three years.

Or should he count himself as older now, since he had lived through so many years in this vision with Malfoy? He _felt_ older. There was nothing in his soul but an echo of the desire he had once felt.

When he paid attention again, Malfoy and Goyle were climbing a pile of broken chair legs, aiming higher and higher. Above them, Harry and his friends swooped on brooms, and Harry shouted something that Draco couldn't make out. Malfoy looked up, blinking smoke away, and Draco clung to the hope that they would both see Harry's hand reaching down towards them.

Weasley and Granger were flying to rescue Goyle. But Harry hovered above Malfoy and stared down, and in those green eyes Draco saw that he could have left Malfoy to his death and not cared anything about it at all.

It was more disturbing than the Dark Arts and the Parseltongue spells that this Harry used so effortlessly, more disturbing than the scar he had left on Malfoy's face. He hung there, and held the power to decide Malfoy's fate in his hands, and looked as if he were choosing the one thing that would be unthinkable to the Harry Draco knew and loved.

And that, _that,_ knowledge, seared him more than the Fiendfyre could have done.

That was the difference between his Harry and this one. This one cared so little about Malfoy that he could consider leaving him to die, despite the shouting of his friends and the way that Malfoy stretched a pathetic, trembling hand up. He had closed off the part of him that could have done anything more. While the Harry Draco knew and loved had never hated him enough to consider abandoning him.

They were not the same. Harry in Gryffindor had enough support to consider more people than just the ones who were nice to him in need of saving. Harry in Slytherin didn't. 

Or he was inherently colder and a worse person. At the moment, Draco wasn't sure which explanation had the more truth, and he wasn't sure that he cared. He focused all his will on Malfoy's hand, trying to make it stretch up and Harry's hand stretch down. He had to care, surely, that this scene might appear in his nightmares for the rest of his life if he left Malfoy to die?

Then Harry grunted, as though responding to someone poking him in the ribs, and reached down. He snatched Malfoy up just ahead of a roaring banner of demons that would have ripped and burned him to shreds. Malfoy found himself sitting on Potter's broom as Potter and Weasley and Granger all reached for the door to the room.

He found himself with his wand hand close to Potter's ribs, and his wand still in his grip, since he'd never dropped it (and, in this universe, Draco added in his head, Potter had never stolen it at the Manor).

The temptation was on him, breathing, palpable. Malfoy wanted it more intensely than he'd wanted anything since Potter first refused his friendship.

 _You idiot,_ Draco screamed, although he didn't fancy the words would make it through. That just made it all the more imperative to scream them, though. _Sabotage him and you'll fall to your death!_

Malfoy might not care about that, though, in preference to getting his revenge, the same way that Harry might not care about guilt and regret compared to the chance to get rid of someone he despised. And the way Malfoy's wand inched closer and closer to Harry's ribs, Draco thought it was probably going to turn out with Malfoy burning to death in a few minutes.

He actually felt, for a moment, that that might be preferable to staying in this vision and seeing the way Malfoy would ultimately screw things up. 

Harry reached back with one hand, keeping the other in a firm grip on his broom, and took Malfoy's wand. He slid it into his pocket, sealed the thing with some kind of nonverbal spell that made it vanish into the cloth, and then continued flying. The whole maneuver had taken perhaps three seconds.

Draco felt Malfoy's numb shock, and enjoyed it as a sort of cool protection from the heat of the fire.

No concern. No care. Harry seemed to always have known what Malfoy intended, and he had disarmed him without even the need for a spell. He had done it while flying out of a room that was on fire, and saving the life of the ungrateful bastard who had tried to kill him.

That was the worst part, Draco thought, after all. That Harry becoming Slytherin made Malfoy _smaller_ than he was, less expansive of soul, more obsessed with vengeance, as if there was only a certain amount of generosity in Slytherin House and Harry had sucked it all up when he was Sorted there.

Draco and Malfoy were both quiet as they were flown out of the Room of Hidden Things and dumped on the floor, while Harry and his real friends went on to greater matters. Draco began to glance around for the mist that would signal the end of this vision, and let him go back to his own world.

There was no sign of it, but the world _did_ blur in the way that meant at least this was the end of the one memory. Draco now wished for eyes to close in relief.

*

He had assumed that the next thing he would be watching was the final battle between Harry and the Dark Lord, but instead, he found himself--or Malfoy--sitting with his mother at a table in the Great Hall. Harry walked towards him, flanked by his friends, and held out the hawthorn wand he had taken during the flight.

"Your wand turned out useful, after all," Harry said in a voice without emotion that might have made Lucius proud to claim him as a son. "Thank you." He nodded at Narcissa, and some genuine warmth leaked into his smile. "Thank you, too, Mrs. Malfoy."

_My mother was more generous and sensible than I was, here. And she must not ever have believed that Harry killed Father, or there's no way that she would have forgiven him._

Malfoy's mother smiled at Harry, and let a hand rest on her son's shoulder for a moment. "You are most welcome, Mr. Potter," she said, and if her voice was not perfectly pleasant and happy, then Draco thought no one else would ever know it. No matter what else had changed between the universes, Narcissa Malfoy was a good actress here as elsewhere. "May I hope that you will also speak for us at the trials?"

Harry nodded and smiled again, and kept his head turned slightly so there was no possible way he would see Malfoy in his field of vision. "Of course. You saved my life, after all."

Nothing about Malfoy. Then again, this Malfoy had not saved his life in the Manor, and it was more about life-debts that Malfoy owed Harry, rather than ones they owed each other.

Malfoy just leaned back and shut his eyes as Harry walked away, leaving Draco to hope that they would have a small amount of contemplation and time to think things over. But instead, a laughing voice pulled his attention forwards again, and Malfoy opened his eyes and turned his head at the same time.

Harry stood in front of Blaise, who had broken away from what looked like a group of Gryffindors and Ravenclaws to confront him. Harry had one hand raised, as though to shield his eyes from the sun, and Blaise was smiling in a way that Draco knew well, but Malfoy, from his slow blinks, didn't.

_I don't want to watch this._

As with so many wishes since his initial one, the vision ignored him. Blaise said something, and Harry smiled, the dazzle-smile. Then he and Blaise walked away, side by side. Blaise slid an arm around Harry's waist, and although Harry turned his head and watched him steadily when he did that, he made no attempt to pull away.

So Harry wasn't someone who had gone emotionless and cold towards everyone in this universe. Just towards the people he had decided were worth nothing and he didn't want to deal with.

That made it worse.

Malfoy tried to say something to his mother, but he was choked, and had to escape. Narcissa let him go, but there was too much interest and intensity in her eyes, and Draco was sure that she would question Malfoy later.

Malfoy stumbled across the Great Hall and into the open air. That didn't make it better, though. The Death Eater bodies had been laid out there, and Malfoy had to look into the faces of people he had tortured, who had tortured him, who had taunted him about what would happen when his mother no longer enjoyed the Dark Lord's favor, who had lorded their power over him during his ritual taking of the Dark Mark.

Desperate, he turned his head and stared up at the setting sun, and perforce, Draco looked with him.

The center of the sun glowed like a diamond on fire, and Draco almost wished it would burn out Malfoy's eyes, so he wouldn't have to see this shitty world anymore. From the way Malfoy clenched his hands, he might have been hoping the same thing.

But perhaps it didn't matter--

He couldn't tell what Malfoy was thinking, because suddenly there were no thoughts there, rushing beside his--

And suddenly--

The light was gone.


	9. The Lineaments of Desire

"Hold on, Draco! Breathe..."

This wasn't the way that Draco had intended to return to his own world, or had thought he would. He felt as though he was drowning in bubbles, in fabric. Something thick and soft filled his lungs, and when he tried to raise his head and breathe on his own, magic clamped him and forced him back down. Draco struggled madly. He had had enough of magic controlling his life and making things impossible for him to do in the vision. He would do _something_ on his own right now, even if it didn't seem all that much.

"Draco, you're going to be fine," Harry's voice said in his ear, and Harry's voice as he knew and understood it, without undertones of hatred and anger. "But please, you have to let me do this. There's something in you I don't understand--something that's preventing me from helping you..."

Draco understood in seconds, but then, he always had been more intelligent about the Dark Arts than Harry. He waited until a little air worked its way into his lungs, and rasped, "It's a ritual. I promised to pay any price, and it's my life that it wants."

For a moment, Harry stopped moving, and Draco was glad that his eyes didn't seem to work. He didn't want to see the expression Harry was probably wearing right now, or the questions forming behind his lips.

Then Harry audibly shook his head, said, "Fuck _that_ ," and turned. Draco heard him chanting, the chant building to the point that Draco shivered from its potency. When he could see again, he looked.

Harry was standing with one foot squarely planted on the ritual circle that Draco had wrapped himself in, and the other just outside it, his wand aimed at what looked like a melted candle, and might have been. The words snarled out from his lips, and the magic in front of him hissed and wavered back and forth like an uncharmed cobra.

Draco, superior understanding or not, still took some time to grasp what he was seeing. It went against the principles of the ritual as well as the laws of magic, and against the conviction, buried pebble-hard within him, that no one could prevent the ritual from claiming the price it had demanded.

But Harry faced the magic that Draco had roused, the debt he had to pay and the price he had agreed to, and forced it back.

The ritual magic manifested as a coiling creature of black and gold, strong and flexible and slender, that darted in multiple directions so fast Draco was left to sort out afterimage from movement long after it was gone in a new one. But it always snapped back together into the melted lump that might well be one of the ritual candles and launched itself at Harry again.

Harry's wand spun and leaped in his hand as if to match the magic, and his words hissed in response. If he was trying to charm the magic, Draco thought in soft wonder that filled his head and rustled in his limbs, then he was doing a good job to choose Parseltongue. But Draco didn't know if that would really work or if there was any such thing as a Dark ritual that Harry could conquer by speaking Parseltongue, either.

He _wanted_ it to work. He wanted to live, so that he could ask himself questions, and Harry questions, and the universe questions, and appreciate this universe for not being the one he had left behind.

Harry took a step backwards, which made Draco try to gasp in concern, only to choke and yield to the spell that worked his lungs again. But Harry had only brought one foot into alignment with the other, and stamped down as if trying to break the metal of the ritual circle that way.

It worked. 

Dark magic shivered into being, away from Harry, running the circle and splintering it as it went, digging bits of metal out of the stone and flinging them about, or melting them, or changing them into half-hazy creatures that dissolved. Harry roared out Parseltongue syllables at the same time, and the coil of magic facing him fell apart. Harry took a step towards it and stood staring down at it for a moment.

Then he kicked the melted lump it had focused on, and the lump fell sideways and dissolved.

Draco tried to say something, but froth still filled his lungs. Harry turned around and came to his side, kneeling down to put a hand on his shoulder. For the first time, Draco became aware of the awkward way he was lying, his head to the side, his legs sprawled across the stone floor of the cellar as though he had tried to kick someone, and grimaced. He would have pushed his arms beneath him and stood, but that was a bit difficult when he was still so focused on breathing.

"I know what you're going to say," Harry said. "And I don't think that you want to say it when you'll get your arse kicked. We'll take you to St. Mungo's and tell them that you went wrong with an experimental potion that miraculously has the exact same symptoms as a foiled ritual. They'll buy it, when I'm talking."

Draco choked on indignation this time. That _he_ had gone wrong with an experimental potion? Did Harry know the harm that would do his reputation? He would have to make sure that--

Then he caught Harry's eye, and fell silent, gaping up at him.

There was something else he hadn't realized, something even more important. Harry knew the Dark ritual Draco had used, and he knew how to foil it. That was knowledge Draco had counted on him _not_ having, because he had thought his ritual circle and all the rest of it safe from Harry's interference. That Harry knew about it suggested either he'd been spying or he wasn't the innocent Draco had thought he was.

Or that Draco had been more careless and clumsy with his preparations than he thought he was.

"Let's get you there," Harry said, after a long moment of silent communion that Draco thought might have told Harry even more than it did him, and Levitated Draco into his arms. Draco closed his eyes and concentrated on working more with than against the spell on his lungs.

He could do this. It looked like he was going to survive this venture into an alternate universe, and survive, also, to ask his questions.

And answer them. Something about the hard gleam in Harry's eyes told Draco he would insist on that.

*

The mediwitch finally stopped smiling at him and realized that Draco Malfoy was still the same snotty man he'd always been, and left in a huff. Draco leaned back against the pillows and sipped at the Healing Potion that some not completely incompetent brewer had made up for him, one that would heal the scars the ritual had apparently left on his lungs and clear up the haze in his mind that the Healers had been afraid could affect his memories.

Draco appreciated the gesture, although he suspected that the memories of the ritual and the universe it had granted him would always stay true and clear in his head. And it meant that he was as sharp in his thoughts as he could be when someone knocked on the door, and did it in a manner that said they weren't a Healer and wouldn't be put off by claims of rest.

"Come in," Draco said, and debated whether he should try to sound contrite in the forthcoming conversation. No, he doubted that would work. Harry knew he had done this dangerous ritual in the first place, after all. The best thing Draco could aim for was honesty.

_But I'd better not be the only one. A blood quill, Harry?_

Harry stepped in and stood there for a moment, against the door, examining Draco with narrow eyes that made it seem as though he was trying to see through smoke. Draco gritted his teeth and did nothing. Doing nothing might be the best course for the future, too. Let Harry come to him and speak _his_ suspicions. Then Draco would know what he had to admit and what he had to deny.

_What happened to total honesty?_

Draco shifted to the side on the pillow. Well, maybe he could admit what he needed to admit, about the ritual and the price he had paid and why he had done it and that Harry had saved his life, but save the most important parts for himself. Like how devastated he had been by Harry in the other universe turning his back on him, and going to Blaise instead. His tongue burned with the desire to ask if _his_ Harry would ever do that.

But to get to that point, he would have to admit more than he wanted to about how the vision had affected him. It was awkward.

"I know you promised to pay any price," Harry said quietly. He sat down on the edge of the bed. Somehow, Draco hadn't noticed him moving over there from the door. Harry put one hand on Draco's blanket-covered foot and gazed at him. "What I don't understand is why. What could be that important to you?"

 _The truth might be valuable after all, if it can shock him into admitting what I wanted him to admit._ Draco met Harry's eyes, smiled a little, and said, "I wanted to know what you would have been like if you'd been in Slytherin."

Harry raised his eyebrows. "Different."

And _that_ was what sometimes irritated Draco the most about his Harry, the fact that Harry could just take important things like his House identity and turn them into matters of no concern. He leaned forwards. "But different how? Would we ever have become friends? Would you have stayed friends with Weasley? Would we have been on the same side in the war? Would we have become lovers?"

Harry twisted his head to the side. "I know myself well enough to know the answers to those questions and what the vision might have showed you, Draco. In order: No, yes, no, and no."

Draco opened his mouth, then closed it. "I talked about the vision in my sleep, and you were with me when I was doing that," he said, but his voice faltered, and he hated to hear something like that.

Harry sighed. "I told you, I know myself well enough to know the answers. If I was in Slytherin House my first year, it still wouldn't change the way you reacted to me on the train, and the way I reacted to you, since that happened _before_ then. And it wouldn't change the way I grew up, which has affected the way I react to lots of things in the wizarding world, which _you_ knew. And I would have gone on chasing Ron until he agreed to be my friend again. Having one person who seemed interested in me and wasn't scared away by Dudley was too precious to give up. Why do you think I never really made all that many more friends except for Hermione during the rest of the time I was at school? Oh, sure, Neville and Dean and Seamus and Fred and George, but they weren't close to me the way Ron and Hermione were. I didn't _need_ that many. Two were enough."

"You can't know that," Draco said faintly. It was the way Harry had acted in the vision, of course, but Draco didn't think he could have predicted his other self's cruelty. "And what about the war? Someone in Slytherin might have persuaded you that you had the wrong idea about what the Dark Lord wanted to accomplish."

Harry's face shut down. "No," he said quietly. "And do you know why, Draco? Because no amount of politics was ever going to make up for the fact that he _killed my bloody parents._ "

"But someone could have--"

Harry shook his head. "It doesn't work that way," he said. "Not with the way I was raised. The Dursleys told me fuck all about my parents, and all of what they said was bad. But I idealized them and clung to them anyway, because they were all I had to cling to, the only people I knew for certain had ever cared about me. That's why it was such a shock later to realize that they weren't perfect, the same way that it was a shock to realize Dumbledore wasn't perfect. I didn't have that many adults to look up to, either. And Voldemort took two of them away. All four of them, really, if you want to count the curse that killed Dumbledore and Bellatrix being loyal to him and killing Sirius for him. I was always going to be his enemy. _Always._ "

Draco swallowed. He had known Harry was fierce and uncompromising in his loyalties, even the ones that appeared to contradict each other; he had seen the way Harry defended Draco to his friends and his friends to Draco.

But still...

"Someone could have made an argument that brought you round. We were all young, and our parents were involved in our lives. Someone could have--"

"I'm actually a very simple person," Harry said placidly, to the disbelief of Draco and probably a large number of the particles that made up the universe. "No, really, Draco, I am. I stick with things I know and I only take risks to defend those things, not because I'm naturally curious about everything like Hermione or because I knew all about the politics you were already steeped in by the time that you were eleven. And I can't think of any argument that would have made an impact on me when I was eleven, no matter how subtle it was. I would just close my eyes and stick by what I knew. Which is childish, yeah, but the right choice just then."

"If you never change your mind, then why are you here?" Draco asked, and his hand might have brushed Harry's accidentally when he gestured.

Harry smiled at him. "Because I grew up, and saw that you were more than I thought you were," he said simply. "I realized that I was wrong when I was eleven. But if I'd known you from the time I was eleven, I would probably just have solidified my hatred of you and not been convinced that anything could ever change it." He paused and gave Draco a direct look. "That's what happened, isn't it?"

Draco nodded slowly. "But you did end up being lovers with Blaise," he said. "Or friends with Blaise. Or something."

"Let me guess," Harry said, a smile hovering near his lips even though his eyes were dark. "He was nice to me?"

Draco nodded again, unwillingly.

Harry sighed, and the smile disappeared. "Draco," he said, "I think you did this because you want to know me, in all the ways and all the universes possible. That's kind of a compliment, and I'll try to take it that way. But it's just--if you want to know about me, you have to _ask_ me. I could have told you all the answers I think you probably discovered in your vision, and for a much smaller price."

"I found out that Umbridge used a blood quill on you," Draco snapped, the words breaking through the fragile barrier of his self-control, "and you never told me _that_. Just like you never told me about being almost Sorted into Slytherin before the other day!"

"Because I didn't want to, and it wasn't important."

Draco gaped at Harry. Harry stared back, and there was a door shut behind his eyes, Draco _knew_ there was, when he'd prided himself on being so honest just moments before. Draco took a deep breath and sat up, testing carefully, but there was no froth in his lungs, no exhaustion in his muscles, which meant he could say what he wanted to say.

"You say that I should just ask you if I want to know something about you," he began. "But then you say that you didn't want to tell me about those things. If you _hide_ things, then why should I just ask you? Of _course_ I have to resort to rituals like this, if I want to know you!"

Harry gave him a smile that had more teeth in it than Draco knew he possessed. "And you've been conducting the Dark Arts in my cellars," he said. "Why didn't you tell me _that_ , which seems a little more important than whether Umbridge used a blood quill on me years ago?"

Draco shook his head. "You're not going to deflect me," he said. "This is a conversation about what you haven't told me."

"And not about the stupid ritual that you did that made you risk your life?" Harry leaned towards him. "Why _should_ it be? You're the one who nearly died, Draco. I'm the one who had to struggle to save you, and found out that you were hiding secrets that you could have endangered your life. Why?"

Draco ground his teeth. Somehow, conversations with Harry went this way about half the time. Draco found himself on the defensive, where he hated to be, and he could only give the true answer, not the one that would have made him look right.

"Because you're right," he said. "I do want to know everything about you. But I can't know it if you don't tell me."

"You can't know everything in any case," Harry said, and snapped his teeth on empty air like a dog. Draco thought it was a substitute for getting up and pacing around the room. "Draco--there are some things I've forgotten that you might want to know, and there are some things I can't tell you because they're other people's secrets, and there are some things I just don't want to talk about. You're not entitled to know _everything_."

"But you're the honest Gryffindor," Draco said, and barely recognized his own voice, the mocking edge was so sharp. Sure, he mocked people, but not Harry, not like this, not anymore. "You're the one who's supposed to tell the truth, you're the one who claims you share all secrets--"

Harry's hand slammed into the pillow near his head, and Harry bent over him. Draco blinked and shut up, out of surprise and not fear. He knew that Harry would never do anything to hurt him, _really_ hurt him.

"You should have known," Harry hissed at him, "that _you're_ the one who characterized me that way. I never said I would share everything. I said I would tell you the things that were important, and that concerned you, and that I wanted to share. You have your Dark Arts in the cellar and your Potions business and all your other secrets. It's not about one of us being a Gryffindor and one of us being a Slytherin, Draco. It's about having some respect for _privacy,_ even in the middle of a relationship that you seem to think should be completely open. If I have to share everything, then _you_ have to, too."

Draco stared at him. Then he said the first thing that sprang to his tongue. "But I'm a Slytherin, you can't expect me to..."

His voice withered in the sun of Harry's glare. 

And he remembered the way Harry had looked, hovering over him during the Fiendfyre, hovering over _Malfoy,_ debating leaving him there. The Hat had considered Harry for Slytherin in that other world and here. Maybe he never would have developed to his potential if placed in that House, but it had seen the potential in the first place.

Harry wasn't just a Gryffindor. Draco had gone into the vision knowing that, desiring to know what he _would_ be like if he was different. And now he was acting as if it wasn't possible for Harry to be different from Draco's conceptions of him.

He could be different. He might be. He could have walked away from Draco after the war and never given him a second thought. He might never have reconsidered that he was wrong when he was eleven, the way he'd just said he had, and hated Draco for the rest of his days. He might have tried being lovers with him and turned away in disgust when it turned out to be difficult.

Draco tried to swallow again, but his throat was too dry. He couldn't just decide that Harry was a separate being from the Harry in that universe, and never think about it again. He couldn't demand that Harry be absolutely honest with him without Harry demanding it back. He couldn't set up House definitions that Harry objected to and not have him knock them down. Harry hadn't believed that people were totally defined by their Houses for a few years now. Draco knew that, had taken advantage of it by dating Harry, and still had thought it was--the same for Harry as for him.

There was all the potential there, glinting, able to be changed. Perhaps that was the true price Draco had to pay for the vision, knowing that chance had played more of a part in the way things turned out than any great personal virtue or the political arguments that Harry claimed wouldn't have convinced him, and that his future relationship with Harry would never be totally secure and might end. 

And maybe he would never totally know Harry, either, and he would have to live with that.

He took a deep breath and looked up. Harry was watching him carefully, and Draco knew this was a moment that could change them if he let it. Say the wrong thing, and Harry would walk away. He wouldn't stay with someone who wanted to know every moment of his past but wouldn't let Harry into half his present.

"I think--wanting to keep some privacy is a _good_ thing," he said.

Harry hesitated, then gave him a delicate smile. "Yeah, I reckon so," he said, and sat on the bed. "Now. Are you going to tell me what was in this vision? And was it worth the price, what you saw?"

Draco winced. He hated doing things that would make him look stupid to Harry. That was another reason he had kept the extent of his Potions business hidden. On the one hand, some of what he brewed was illegal; on the other hand, he hadn't wanted Harry to know that he ever failed in his experiments.

"Or, if you like," Harry said, in a voice as delicate as the smile, "we can leave it here, if you like, and never talk about it again."

Draco hesitated. The escape stretched in front of him, a path he could walk down, and when he left hospital, the world would be exactly as it had always been--

A world where he could never tell Harry exactly what had happened in the vision, if he decided that he wanted to, and where he could never ask some of the questions the vision had inspired, questions that Harry might want to answer. A world where Harry pretended ignorance about his potions and rituals, and Draco pretended ignorance of the ways that Harry was different from him. 

A world that wasn't really the same at all, no matter how you looked at it. 

That was the thing about glinting moments, edge moments, provided that he recognized them in time. Someone could change them, sure, and for the worse. But if _Draco_ was the one to recognize them, then he had the power to decide how they should change.

And he wanted this one.

"No," he said. "I want to tell you."

Harry gave him a long, assessing glance. Draco could watch the thoughts moving behind his eyes, thoughts that he knew he would never have noticed before. Harry might think he was a simple person, or used to be, but right now, this was a man who was judging, cautiously, the costs of listening.

Draco saw the moment when he decided the reward was worth the costs, even before Harry took his hand up and turned it over.

"I'm listening," he said.

 _In other worlds, Harry wasn't mine,_ Draco thought as he closed his fingers firmly around Harry's and started to speak. _We never got together. He was Blaise's, or Weasley's, or he died._

_But in this world, he's mine. Even if the threat that he might not be forever isn't going to go away._

_And as much as I can influence it, I want it to stay that way._

The End.


End file.
